Back from Eternity

John Villiers Farrow, CBE KGCHS was an Australian-born American film director, producer and screenwriter. In 1957 he won the Academy Award for Best Writing/Best Screenplay for Around the World in Eighty Days and in 1942 he was nominated as Best Director for Wake Island. Farrow was born in Sydney,... Australia, the son of Lucy Villiers , a dressmaker, and Joseph Farrow, a tailor's trimmer. He was educated at Newtown Public School and Fort Street Boys' High School, then passed the exams to get into the Australian Naval College at aged 12. However Farrow claims the Navy was downsizing and demobilising so decided to join the Merchant Service as a cadet instead. He travelled throughout the Pacific, including New Zealand, Fiji, Hawaii and Canada. He later claimed to have fought in battles in Nicaragua and Mexico. He studied at St Ignatius College at the University of San Francisco in 1923 for one month, and resumed his travels. Farrow started writing while working as a sailor and became interested in screenwriting after meeting Robert Flaherty. In 1927 it was reported he was working on a story called The Blue Danube, set in Austria.
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