Olaf Olsen: 

A Man of the Movies 

Olaf Olsen had a long career both in front of and behind the camera. 

Born in 1919 in Heidelberg, Germany, Olsen moved to England when he was 15, and began acting professionally while still a teenager. He played mostly supporting roles in 29 British films including “The Man in the White Suit,” “Lilli Marlene,” and “We Dive at Dawn,” alongside such greats as Alec Guinness, Deborah Kerr, John Mills, and Leslie Howard. 

At 18, he portrayed a German POW in the BBC production of “Journey’s End,” the first full-length drama ever broadcast over live television. 

He was only 19 in 1938 when he played Queen Victoria's son-in-law with Dame Anna Neagle as the queen in “Sixty Glorious Years,” a film about the reign of Queen Victoria. In 1953, the year of the present queen's coronation, he portrayed Prince Albert with Miss Neagle in the musical version of the Victoria story, “The Glorious Days,” which was at London’s Palace Theatre for two years. 

Olsen also appeared in more than 1,000 BBC radio and TV broadcasts. In 1954, he went to Hollywood to sign a movie contract but Jack B. Ward offered him the vice-presidency of Ward Acres Studios of New Rochelle, N.Y., a newly formed enterprise that produced TV commercials and documentaries. In 1957 he and Ward moved to a Ridgefield estate that had once been the Ridgefield Golf Club, calling it Ward Acres, and breeding and raising award-winning thoroughbred racing horses. 

He continued to produce travel documentaries as the Olsen Film Productions Company, serving as cameraman, producer, director, cutter, editor, and synchronizer. Distributed by the J. Arthur Rank Group, most were world travelogues, but some also dealt with horses and wildlife. His favorite was “Lion Country Safari.” 

One of his interests was exotic waterfowl, and he kept a number of species of geese and ducks from around the world on a Ward Acres pond alongside Lewis Drive. He gave up the hobby, he said, after both wild predators and neighborhood children repeatedly attacked his birds.

Almost as soon as he arrived here,  Olsen became active in the Red Cross. He also formed a group that visited and entertained patients — including the criminally insane — at the old Fairfield Hills State Hospital in Newtown, Southbury Training School, and other institutions and hospitals in the region. He showed his films to many organizations and in many schools. 

Did he miss acting? he was asked in 1975. “No,” he replied. “When you've had your name in lights for two years in London, what else do you want?”

Nonetheless, in 1996, when he returned to London for a memorial to Dame Anna Neagle, many fans sought his autograph and Princess Anne invited him to a party. “What a delightful and fascinating man he is,” the Princess was quoted as saying after meeting and chatting with  the long-retired actor.

Olsen died in 2000 in Ridgefield at the age of 81.

C. Chandler Ross: 

Portrait Artist

C. Chandler Ross was a portrait artist who painted many of the captains of industry during the first half of the 20th Century, including F. W. Woolworth of the store chain, but he had also produced portraits of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S Truman.  

Born in 1887 in England, he studied art in Paris and Munich, and under Anders Zorn, a Swedish master of painting.   

 “The American business executive is not the hard, crusty individual he is supposed to be,” Ross once said. “Invariably I find that he is most delightful when he drops the guard that modern business forces him to maintain during office hours.” 

His work included even miniature portraits, done in the style of the 18th and 19th Centuries.

When not painting portraits,  Chandler turned to flowers, and his floral paintings were well known and often reproduced. Many were published by the New York Graphic Society.

In Ridgefield, Ross was better known as the man who purchased the former Ridgefield Golf Club and built the Peaceable Street estate that later became Ward Acres, home of Jack Boyd Ward and Olaf Olsen. 

Ross died in 1952 in Sarasota, Fla. at the age of 64. (He was no relation to another well-known Ridgefield artist, Alexander Ross.)

Jack B. Ward: 

A Caring Citizen

The front-page headline in the Aug. 6, 1998, told the story: “Jack B. Ward, dead at 82, used fortune to aid others.” 

The son of a leader in the baking industry, Ward gave away millions to Danbury Hospital, the Visiting Nurse Association, the Ridgefield Fire Department, Jesse Lee Memorial United Methodist Church, and many other organizations and individuals over four decades. 

 “All he ever wanted to do was to help people,”  said his longtime companion and business partner, Olaf Olsen. 

Born in 1916, Jack Boyd Ward grew up on the family’s 800-acre farm in New Rochelle, N.Y. He was a grandson of Robert Boyd Ward, who founded the Ward Baking Company, later Continental Baking, whose most famous products included Twinkies and Tip Top Bread. In the early 20th Century, Ward was the largest baking company in America.

Ward’s father, William Breining Ward, became president of the company and was only 44 years old when he died of a heart attack in 1929 — son Jack was 13 at the time.

Jack Ward served as a flight instructor in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. He was married and divorced, and had a daughter.

Introduced to the town through visits to dine at Tode’s Inn at Ridgefield and The Elms Inn, Ward moved to town in 1957, buying a spread on Peaceable Street and Golf Lane that was once the Ridgefield Golf Club. The estate had been created in the late 1930s by C. Chandler Ross, a noted portrait painter, and was later owned by Lyle B. Torrey. The 19-room Georgian Colonial house sat on

54 acres, most of which have since been subdivided.

Most of his 40 years here were spent at Ward Acres Farm where he and Olsen raised hunter and hackney horses, and maintained a museum of antique carriages that eventually included more than 50 vehicles. Up to 45 horses were stabled at Ward Acres in its heyday, and many were champions – one of his horses sold for $4.5 million. 

He had loved show horses since he was a small child. At the age of 6, he participating in his first show, riding a Welsh pony in Madison Square Garden. “Two ponies were in the class,” he told an interviewer in 1990. “The other pony was black with a little girl on it. They asked us to trot and canter. I was bouncing along, having a wonderful time. The blue ribbon, that’s first, went to the other pony. My ribbon was red and I was delighted. I happened to love red. I didn’t care if it was first or second.”

He and Olsen had a pond at Golf Lane and Lewis Drive where Olsen especially maintained a collection of exotic waterfowl, including black swans from Australia. “That was quite an attraction, and many people would come up there and look,” Ward said.

 His parents influenced his desire to give. “My family has always been interested in philanthropy in a very quiet way,” he said in 1982. “My father had many large memorials that he made for his parents. One was Ward Manor, an old folks home up in New York State. Another was a place for poor little mountain children down in Baxter, Tenn., and another was for farm boys in

Kentucky. So I really grew up with this interest in giving money, not necessarily just for the poor but for the underprivileged and the sick and the old.”

Perhaps the fact that his father died so young led Ward to focus much of his generosity on health care.  Almost as soon as he arrived here, he bought the town a new, modern ambulance. He equipped the Districting Nursing Association with its first car and fixed up its headquarters on Catoonah Street. 

In 1968, he contributed $150,000 ($1 million in today’s money) toward the cost of a new coronary intensive care unit at Danbury Hospital. Later the same year, having heard that cancer patients were having to travel to New Haven or New York for radiation treatment, he donated $100,000 ($690,000) for a cobalt unit to the Danbury Hospital, where he also served as a director and a trustee.

“In the early days when the Danbury Hospital development fund was just getting started, Jack played an enormous role,” said Frank Kelly, former president of the hospital. “The whole region owes him a tremendous debt of gratitude.”

Among his many smaller gifts was $5,000 ($36,000) to expand and fix up the old Titicus School for its use as the American Legion Hall.

Ward was a member of Jesse Lee Memorial United Methodist Church where he made a many donations in memory of his mother, Ethel Haney Ward, who had lived with him at Ward Acres until her death in 1965. These included the altar, stained glass windows, and bells. He helped plan the church’s move from an old building in the center of town to the new brick church at the head of Branchville Road. 

Many of Jack Ward’s contributions to people and organizations, including the town, were private and unpublicized, noted Sue Manning, who was first selectman when Ward died. “He was a good citizen,” she added. “He was a caring citizen.”