If any man ever had a character face absolutely made for TV and film, it was Paul Ford. Small-eyed, lugubrious, pot-bellied, balding and with a plum nose to rival Karl Malden, Ford was a rather wanderlust family man who decided to give acting a try in his early 40. He excelled at puppetry and found work staging such shows at the World's Fair. This eventually led to a fair amount of radio, theater and film offers where he began typically playing blowhard military brass and gruff executives.
Paul's "overnight success" didn't occur until the mid-1950s at age 54, when he portrayed a befuddled, blustery second banana to comedian Phil Silvers on TV, butting heads week after week (as Colonel Hall) with Silvers' classic portrayal of Sergeant Bilko in the The Phil Silvers Show (1955). Playing the role for four seasons, Ford was rewarded for this success by being given the privilege to take two of his popular stage roles to film: La petite maison de thé (1956), as yet another huffy, iron-willed colonel, and Never Too Late (1965) as the sixty-something old coot certainly not welcoming his unexpected fatherhood. Ford eventually retired in 1972, and died four years later of an extended illness. Falling in somewhere between W.C. Fields and Walter Matthau, this delightful curmudgeon certainly paid his dues and deserved his relatively brief twilight success.
