Hugh Ford on AllMovie

An important early writer/director, Hugh Ford came to films from the legitimate stage where he had directed such classics as Joseph and His Brethren, The Yellow Ticket, and The Garden of Allah. Under contract to Famous Players in the mid-1910s, Ford became an assistant to the veteran Edwin S. Porter and co-directed Mary Pickford's Such a Little Queen (1914) and, with Pickford's chief rival Marguerite Clark, The Prince and the Pauper (1915). More important to the success of these films than the rather stolid Porter, Ford was assigned sole directorship on the important The Eternal City (1915), filmed on location in Italy, where he handled potentially troublesome crowd scenes with near-legendary aplomb. He continued to direct a number of important films in the next couple of years -- including a version of Seven Keys to Baldpate (1917) and Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch (1919) -- some of which he also wrote, but his career ended suddenly in 1921.