Raymond Longford

Raymond Longford
Portrait of Raymond Longford, circa 1935.
Born	John Walter Longford (1878-09-23)23 September 1878 Hawthorn, Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.
Died	2 April 1959(1959-04-02) (aged 80) North Sydney, Australia.
Other names	Raymond Hollis Longford
Occupation	Director, actor, screenwriter, editor, film producer
Years active	1911–1941

Raymond Longford (23 September 1878 – 2 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 Longford Lyell Award, inducted in 1968, and named in his and Lyell's honour.

John Walter Hollis Longford was born in Hawthorn, a suburb of Melbourne, 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.

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).