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Ford John

John Martin Feeney (February 1, 1894 – August 31, 1973), known professionally as John Ford, was an American film director and naval officer. He is renowned both for Westerns such as Stagecoach (1939), The Searchers (1956), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and adaptations of classic 20th century American novels such as The Grapes of Wrath (1940). He was the recipient of six Academy Awards including a record four wins for Best Director.

In a career of more than 50 years, Ford directed more than 140 films (although most of his silent films are now lost) and he is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers of his generation.[2] Ford's work was held in high regard by his colleagues, with Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman among those who named him one of the greatest directors of all time.

Ford made frequent use of location shooting and wide shots, in which his characters were framed against a vast, harsh, and rugged natural terrain.

Ford was born John Martin "Jack" Feeney (though he later often gave his given names as Seán Aloysius, sometimes with surname O'Feeny or Ó Fearna; an Irish language equivalent of Feeney) in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, to John Augustine Feeney and Barbara "Abbey" Curran, on February 1, 1894,(though he occasionally said 1895 and that date is erroneously inscribed on his tombstone).[5] His father, John Augustine, was born in Spiddal,County Galway, Ireland, in 1854. Barbara Curran was born in the Aran Islands, in the town of Kilronan on the island of Inishmore (Inis Mór).[5] John A. Feeney's grandmother, Barbara Morris, was said to be a member of an impoverished branch of a family of the Irish nobility, the Morrises of Spiddal (headed at present by Lord Killanin).

John Augustine and Barbara Curran arrived in Boston and Portland respectively in May and June 1872. They filed their intentions to marry on July 31, 1875, and became American citizens five years later on September 11, 1880.The John Augustine Feeney family resided on Sheridan Street, in the Irish neighborhood of Munjoy Hill in Portland, Maine, and his father worked a variety of odd jobs to support the family – farming, fishing, a laborer for the gas company, saloon keeping, and an alderman.[5] John and Barbara had eleven children: Mamie (Mary Agnes), born 1876; Delia (Edith), 1878–1881; Patrick; Francis Ford, 1881–1953; Bridget, 1883–1884; Barbara, born and died 1888; Edward, born 1889; Josephine, born 1891; Hannah (Joanna), born and died 1892; John Martin, 1894–1973; and Daniel, born and died 1896 (or 1898).

Feeney attended Portland High School, Portland, Maine, where he played fullback and defensive tackle. He earned the nickname "Bull" because, it is said, of the way he would lower his helmet and charge the line. A Portland pub is named Bull Feeney's in his honor. He later moved to California and in 1914 began working in film production as well as acting for his older brother Francis, adopting "Jack Ford" as a professional name. In addition to credited roles, he appeared uncredited as a Klansman in D. W. Griffith's 1915 The Birth of a Nation.

He married Mary McBride Smith on July 3, 1920, and they had two children. His daughter Barbara was married to singer and actor Ken Curtis from 1952 to 1964. The marriage between Ford and Smith lasted for life despite various issues, one being that Ford was Catholicwhile she was a non-Catholic divorcée. What difficulty was caused by this is unclear as the level of Ford's commitment to the Catholic faith is disputed. Another strain was Ford's many extramarital relationships.

Ford won a total of four Academy Awards with all of them being for Best Director, for the films 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 later directed two documentaries, The Battle of Midway and December 7th, which both won Best Documentary, although the award was not won by him. 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 also received a nomination for Best Picture for The Quiet Man. 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 an Oscar for one of their roles in one of Ford's 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 No. 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, cast at Modern Art Foundry, Astoria, NY, and commissioned by Louisiana philanthropist Linda Noe Laine was unveiled on 12 July 1998 at Gorham's Corner in Portland, Maine, United States, as part of a celebration of Ford that was later to include renaming the auditorium of Portland High School the John Ford Auditorium.

In 2019 Jean-Christophe Klotz released the documentary film John Ford, l'homme qui inventa l'Amérique, about his influence in the legend of the American West in films like Stagecoach (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964).

Courtesy--wikipedia
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