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Jack Foley (sound effects artist)

American sound effects developer

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionSep 23, 2026
Entity authorityQ1677036
Source-derived summary

Jack Donovan Foley (April 12, 1891 – November 9, 1967) was an American sound effects artist who was the developer of many sound effect techniques used in filmmaking. He is credited with developing a unique method for performing sound effects live and in synchrony with the picture during a film's post-production. Accordingly, individuals engaged in this trade are called "Foley artists".

He worked on pictures such as Melody of Love (1928), Show Boat (1929), Dat Ol' Ribber, Dracula (1931), Operation Petticoat (1959), and Spartacus (1960). For his work in Hollywood, Foley received the Motion Picture Sound Editors' Golden Reel Award.

Early life

Jack Foley was born on April 12, 1891, in Yorkville, New York, to Irish immigrants Margaret Donovan and Michael Foley. Foley was raised in the area of Coney Island. Foley's parents were separated as Margaret lived with her father and four sisters. When Foley was sixteen, Margaret married Michael Gilmartin, the son of Sligo immigrants. Foley's biological father worked at the docks and was a volunteer firefighter as well as a singer and songwriter for local pubs.

Editorial summary

“Jack Foley (sound effects artist)” enters the record as american sound effects developer. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Jack, Foley and sound can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1891, 1967, 1928, 1929—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1891-04-12. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Jack, Foley and sound.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Jack Foley (sound effects artist)” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Jack, Foley and sound provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1677036. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1891, 1967, 1928 and 1929.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from Jack Foley (sound effects artist)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.