Glenn Ford a laconic, soft-spoken actor whose leading roles in westerns, melodramas and romantic films made his name a familiar one on movie-house marquees from the early 1940’s through the 60’s, died Wednesday at his home in Beverly Hills. He was 90.

Paramedics called to the home shortly before 4 p.m. found him dead, the police said. He had a series of strokes in the 1990’s.

In movies like “Gilda” (1947), “The Big Heat” (1953),“Blackboard Jungle” (1955) and “Pocketful of Miracles”(1961), Mr. Ford’s acting could appear effortless. But in his quiet, easygoing manner, he could also project a certain depth and complexity of character, combining affability with resoluteness, gentleness with inner strength. Critics consistently gave his performances high praise.

Though Mr. Ford was never nominated for an Academy Award, he was popular with moviegoers, especially in the 1950’s, starring in box-office successes like “The Teahouse of the August Moon” (1956), “Don’t Go Near the Water” (1957) and “Imitation General” (1958).

He had started his Hollywood career seemingly typecast as an actor who could do well in undistinguished films. He made a series of B movies for Columbia Pictures, playing featured roles in such forgettable productions as “Men Without Souls” and “My Son Is Guilty” (both in 1940) and“Texas,” “The Desperadoes” and “Destroyer” (all in 1941).

He usually attracted critical praise even when the script, production and direction were anything but praiseworthy.

In 1946, for example, Mr. Ford starred opposite Rita Hayworth in “Gilda,” a film remembered mostly as the vehicle for her provocative lip-synching of a song called “Put the Blame on Mame.” Writing in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther praised Mr. Ford’s “stamina and poise in a thankless role.”

But in the 1950’s, Mr. Ford began to make pictures that were more worthy of his talents. In “Blackboard Jungle,” for example, he played an idealistic, beleaguered teacher in a tough New York City high school. The film, with an opening sequence set to Bill Haley and the Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock,” also starred Sidney Poitier and was nominated for four Oscars, including one for best screenplay.

“I had always marveled at the subtlety of his work,” Mr. Poitier told The Associated Press this week.

Mr. Ford’s popularity continued into the 1960’s, when he starred in films like “Pocketful of Miracles,” playing a warmhearted bootlegger opposite Bette Davis’s street beggar Apple Annie; “Experiment in Terror (1962), with Lee Remick; “The Courtship of Eddie’s Father” (1963), which later became the basis of a television series with Bill Bixby; and “The Rounders” (1965), with Henry Fonda.

Gwyllyn Samuel Newton Ford was born on May 1, 1916, in Quebec, the only child of Newton and Hannah Ford. The Fords, of Welsh descent, were prominent in Canada. Newton Ford was a railroad executive and mill owner and a nephew of Sir John MacDonald, a former prime minister of Canada. Another Ford ancestor was Martin Van Buren, the eighth president of the United States.

Gwyllyn was initially reared in Ste.-Christine, Portneuf, an hour from the city of Quebec. When he was 7, his family moved to Santa Monica, Calif., where Mr. Ford was educated.

After high school, he began working with small theater groups. He later said his father had no objection to his growing interest in acting but had told him: “It’s all right for you to try to act, if you learn something else first. Be able to take a car apart and put it together. Be able to build a house, every bit of it. Then you’ll always have something.”

Mr. Ford listened to his father, and in the 1950’s, when he was one of the nation’s most popular actors, he regularly worked on plumbing, wiring and air-conditioning at home.

At various times, Mr. Ford worked as a roofer and an installer of plate-glass windows. At one point, he worked in a Santa Monica bar, keeping it clean for $5 a week. Years later, as a successful actor, he would drive by that bar almost every day. “There are too many places here that won’t let me forget how I started,” he told an interviewer.

In the late 1930’s, he managed to get a screen test at 20th Century Fox but did not do well. Given a second chance, however, he later won his first movie part, in 1939, in “Heaven With a Barbed Wire Fence.”

He was billed as Gwyllyn Ford in that movie, but when he signed a long-term contract with Columbia Pictures shortly afterward, the studio’s chief, Harry Cohn, asked him to change his name, suggesting John Gower. Mr. Ford compromised, keeping his last name but changing his first.

The B movies followed until 1943, when he joined the Marine Corps. While in the Marines, he met the dancer Eleanor Powell at a war-bond cavalcade. They were married in 1943 and had a son, Peter, who survives. The marriage ended in divorce in 1959.

In 1966, Mr. Ford married Kathryn Hays, an actress, but the marriage ended quickly. In 1977, he wed Cynthia Hayward, a model 32 years his junior. They divorced in 1984. In 1993, he married Jeanne Baus, but they, too, soon divorced.

By 1965, his star power had enabled him to build a luxurious home in Beverly Hills featuring an atrium over which hung a 900-pound artificial sun. Mr. Ford could switch it on whenever he wanted to feel drenched with light. The house also held a replica of an English pub, to which he retreated when he preferred the shadows.

As Mr. Ford grew older, he was cast less frequently, but in “Superman” (1978) he appeared in a brief scene as Clark Kent’s father. He also made some movies for television, among them “Punch and Jody” (1974), “The Disappearance of Flight 412” (1975), “Evening in Byzantium” (1978) and “The Sacketts”(1979), and appeared in the series “Cade’s County” (1971). In 1978, he was the host of the series “When Havoc Struck.”

In his heyday, there were times when it seemed that Mr. Ford was averse to vacations. In 1960 and 1961 he worked on four overlapping projects: “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,” “Cry for Happy,” “Cimarron” and “Pocketful of Miracles.” In all, from 1939 to 1991, Mr. Ford appeared in 85 films, according to the Film Encyclopedia.

When someone noted in the 60’s that in five years he had taken off an average of only 21 days between films, Mr. Ford replied simply, “I like to work.”