John Ford - Awards and Honors

Awards and Honors

Ford won a total of six Academy Awards. Four of these were for Best Director for The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952) - none of them Westerns (also starring in the last two was Maureen O'Hara, "his favorite actress"). He was also nominated as Best Director for Stagecoach (1939). He won two Oscars for Best Documentary for The Battle of Midway and December 7th. To this day Ford holds the record for winning the most Best Director Oscars, having won the award on four occasions. William Wyler and Frank Capra come in second having won the award three times. Ford was the first director to win consecutive Best Director awards, in 1940 and 1941. This feat was later matched by Joseph L. Mankiewicz exactly ten years later, when he won consecutive awards for Best Director in 1950 and 1951. As a producer he received nominations for Best Picture for The Quiet Man and The Long Voyage Home. In 1955 and 1957, Ford was awarded The George Eastman Award, given by George Eastman House for distinguished contribution to the art of film. He was the first recipient of the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award in 1973. Also in that year, Ford was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Richard Nixon.

Ford directed 10 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Victor McLaglen, Thomas Mitchell, Edna May Oliver, Jane Darwell, Henry Fonda, Donald Crisp, Sara Allgood, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly and Jack Lemmon. McLaglen, Mitchell, Darwell, Crisp and Lemmon won Oscar for one of their roles in one of Fords movies.

A television special featuring Ford, John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda was broadcast over the CBS network on December 5, 1971 called The American West of John Ford, featuring clips from Ford's career interspersed with interviews conducted by Wayne, Stewart, and Fonda, who also took turns narrating the hourlong documentary.

In 2007, Twentieth Century Fox released "Ford at Fox", a DVD boxed set of 24 of Ford's films. Time magazine's Richard Corliss named it one of the "Top 10 DVDs of 2007", ranking it at #1.

A statue of Ford in Portland, Maine depicts him sitting in a director's chair. The statue made by New York sculptor George M. Kelly and commissioned by Louisiana philanthropst Linda Noe Laine was unveiled on 12 July 1998 at Gorham's Corner in Portland, Maine, United State, as part of a celebration of Ford that was later to include renaming the auditorium of Portland High School the John Ford Auditorium.