Raymond Longford (born John Walter Hollis Longford, 23 September 18782 April 1959) was a prolific Australian film director, writer, producer, and actor during the silent era. Longford was a major director of the silent film era of the Australian cinema. He formed a production team with Lottie Lyell. His contributions to Australian cinema with his ongoing collaborations with Lyell, including The Sentimental Bloke (1919) and The Blue Mountains Mystery (1921), prompted the Australian Film Institute's AFI Raymond Longford Award, inaugurated in 1968, to be named in his honour.
Biography
John Walter Hollis Longford was born in Hawthorn, a suburb of Melbourne, the son of John Walter Longford, a civil servant originally from Sydney, and his English wife, Charlotte Maria. His family soon started referring to him as "Ray". By 1880, they briefly moved to Paynesville, then went to Sydney when Longford's father became a warder at Darlinghurst Gaol.
Longford became a sailor and spent his early life at sea. He started acting on the stage in India under the name Raymond Hollis Longford. In the early 1900s he toured Australia and New Zealand with Edwin Geach's Popular Dramatic Organisation, and Clarke and Meynell companies. He was a stage manager for the Liliam Meyers Dramatic Company. Longford often appeared alongside a young actress called Lottie Lyell, who would become Longford's key creative partner.
He was an early member of the Australian actors union, a forerunner to Actors Equity.
Film career
In 1907, Longford worked on a film produced by Charles Cozens Spencer about the fight between Tommy Burns and Jack Johnson, probably the first movie Longford was involved in. He then began appearing in movies for Spencer as an actor under the direction of Alfred Rolfe such as Captain Midnight, the Bush King (1911).
Move into directing
Rolfe eventually left Spencer's company to make films elsewhere, so in 1911 Spencer hired Longford to direct his first feature, The Fatal Wedding, adapted from a play in which Longford had appeared on stage and starring Lyell. Made quickly, with a limited budget and small crew, it was a major financial success and launched his career behind the camera.
Longford followed this up with several other play adaptations for Spencer including The Romantic Story of Margaret Catchpole (1911), Sweet Nell of Old Drury and The Midnight Wedding (1912); Longford also wrote an original for the screen The Tide of Death. Lyell appeared in most of these and also made increasingly important contributions behind the scene as a writer, editor, producer, and co-director.
Freelancing
Charles Cozens Spencer eventually withdrew from Australian film production due to the formation of "the Combine" (which absorbed Spencer's old company). This left Longford without his main backer and he found it increasingly difficult to secure funding for a time.
He went to work for the Fraser Film Release and Photographic Company for who he made a feature and a number of shorts, however, they eventually ended the contract after Longford became involved in a lawsuit following the making of the highly popular The Silence of Dean Maitland (1914).
Longford had an operation in March 1915.
He made another number of shorts for a variety of companies and taught film acting. He then made two films in New Zealand and also became embroiled in another legal battle over The Church and the Woman (1917).
In September 1916, he worked for Crick and Jones preparing scenarios.
Career peak: The Sentimental Bloke
Longford's career revived towards the end of World War I when he helped establish the Southern Cross Feature Film Company in South Australia. He enjoyed a large box office success with The Woman Suffers (1918) (despite the film being banned in New South Wales) which enabled him to get finance for an adaptation of the poetry of C. J. Dennis, The Sentimental Bloke (1919). This was an enormous critical and popular success, and is regarded as one of the greatest Australian films of all time. Longford followed it with another hit, On Our Selection (1920), from the stories of Steele Rudd.