John Villiers Farrow, author and movie director was born on February 10, 1904 in Sydney, Australia, to parents Joseph Farrow and Lucy Savage. His father survived World War I as a soldier in the Australian Army though his mother died very young in 1907. Educated at Newtown Public School and Fort Street Boys' High School, young John (or Jack as he was called) ran away to sea in an American ship. He supposedly became a roving adventurer who sailed throughout the Pacific Ocean and fought in revolts in Nicaragua and Mexico before reaching San Francisco, California, in 1923. After further sea adventures, he ended up in Hollywood in 1927 where his nautical expertise, combined with the fact that he was already known as a poet and short story writer, resulted in work as a film script consultant and technical adviser.

Farrow worked for both De Mille Productions and Paramount Pictures writing script dialogue and for RKO Pictures writing movie screenplays before a stint in England where he wrote for the 1932 film Woman in Chains and 1933's Don Quixote. He also spent time in Tahiti, where he wrote an English-French-Tahitian language dictionary and a 1933 novel titled Laughter Ends. Returning to Hollywood in 1933, Farrow was arrested because of a false passport and expired visa and placed on five years probation (he became and American citizen in 1947). He continued writing and published a biography of Father Damien titled Damien the Leper in 1937, which was reprinted many times and translated into several languages. He later wrote a history of the papacy, Pageant of the Popes, in 1942, and a biography of Sir Thomas More in 1954.

He served as an officer in the Royal Canadian Navy in the Second World War, 1940-1942, working on shore with intelligence, censorship, and press relations as well as serving at sea on anti-submarine patrols before retiring as an honorary commander. Having developed from the late 1930s as a notable film director, he was enlisted to the war effort by major studios, winning the New York Film Critics' Circle award and an American academy award nomination for the box office hit Wake Island in 1942. He also did a documentary drama called The Hitler Gang in 1944 and a naval yarn Two Years before the Mast in 1946. Additionally, he did several film noir classics such as The Big Clock in 1947, Where Danger Lives in 1950, and His Kind of Woman in 1951. He made a notable western, Hondo, with John Wayne, in 1953, and shared an academy award as co-writer of the screenplay for Around the World in Eighty Days in 1956. His last movie was 1959's John Paul Jones with Robert Stack in the lead role. Farrow had tried to make a film on the life of Christ, but that was a disappointing failure.

John Farrow had divorced his first wife, Felice Lewin, in the 1930s and married Irish actress and screen legend Maureen O'Sullivan in 1936, who was already famous for playing Jane opposite Johnny Weismuller's iconic Tarzan. They would remain married until his death and have seven children. He had also converted to Roman Catholicism, a religion he shared with his second wife and family. Now a highly acclaimed producer and film director in Hollywood, he died suddenly of heart disease on January 27, 1963 at his house in Beverly Hills. He was survived by his wife, Maureen O'Sullivan, and six of their children, most notably his daughter Mia who had just begun her film career. The first born child, Michael Damien Farrow, had died in a plane crash in 1958. Among his many awards, John Farrow had been granted a knighthood of the grand cross of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre by Pope Pius XI. Farrow was also an honorary member of the Belgian Societe Royale Humanitaire, and received decorations from the Order of the Crown of Rumania, and the Order of St. John of Jerusalem.