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• Born: 1 February 1894
• Birthplace: Cape Elizabeth, Maine
• Died: 31 August 1973
• Best Known As: Director of The Searchers and other Hollywood westerns

Name at birth: John Martin Feeney

John Ford is one of the most celebrated filmmakers in history, the director of American westerns such as Stagecoach (1939, the movie that made John Wayne a star), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and The Searchers (1956, co-starring Natalie Wood). He started working in Hollywood in the early part of the 20th century and by 1917 he had worked his way into the director's chair, making mostly short westerns. He gained a reputation as a hard worker with an eye for composition, and by the 1930s was regularly directing studio features. He won his first Oscar for the 1935 film The Informer, and won two more for directing The Grapes of Wrath (1940, starring Henry Fonda) and How Green Was My Valley (1941). During World War II Ford made documentary films, including Oscar winners The Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7 (1943). After the war Ford continued making movies, mostly westerns shot in the Monument Valley in Arizona and Utah. Praised for his artistic vision as well as for his work ethic and prolific output, Ford was the first-ever recipient of the American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Award (1973). His other films include Fort Apache (1948), Rio Grande (1950), The Quiet Man (1952, and his fourth Oscar) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962).

Famously irascible and proud of his Irish heritage, Ford often told people his birth name was Sean Aloysius Feeney (or O'Feeney)... Ford also often stated his year of birth as 1895, but city and baptismal records from Maine indicate that the correct year was 1894... Ford used the same group of actors for many of his films, a "stock company" that included John Wayne, Henry Fonda, John Carradine, Harry Carey, Jr. and Victor McLaglen.

• Born: Feb 01, 1895 in Cape Elizabeth, Maine
• Died: Aug 31, 1973 in Palm Desert, California
• Occupation: Director, Writer, Actor
• Active: teens-'60s
• Major Genres: Drama, Western
• Career Highlights: The Quiet Man, My Darling Clementine, Stagecoach
• First Major Screen Credit: Broken Coin (1915)

Biography

Maine-born John Ford (born Sean Aloysius O'Fearna) originally went to Hollywood in the shadow of his older brother, Francis, an actor/writer/director who had worked on Broadway. Originally a laborer, propman's assistant, and occasional stuntman for his brother, he rose to became an assistant director and supporting actor before turning to directing in 1917. Ford became best known for his Westerns, of which he made dozens through the 1920s, but he didn't achieve status as a major director until the mid-'30s, when his films for RKO (The Lost Patrol [1934], The Informer [1935]), 20th Century Fox (Young Mr. Lincoln [1939], The Grapes of Wrath [1940]), and Walter Wanger (Stagecoach [1939]), won over the public, the critics, and earned various Oscars and Academy nominations. His 1940s films included one military-produced documentary co-directed by Ford and cinematographer Gregg Toland, December 7th (1943), which creaks badly today (especially compared with Frank Capra's Why We Fight series); a major war film (They Were Expendable [1945]); the historically-based drama My Darling Clementine (1946); and the "cavalry trilogy" of Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), and Rio Grande (1950), each of which starred John Wayne. My Darling Clementine and the cavalry trilogy contain some of the most powerful images of the American West ever shot, and are considered definitive examples of the Western.

Ford also had a weakness for Irish and Gaelic subject matter, in which a great degree of sentimentality was evident, most notably How Green Was My Valley (1941) and The Quiet Man (1952), which was his most personal film, and one of his most popular. It also earned more Oscars and nominations than any other movie ever produced at Republic Pictures. Poor health dogged Ford's career during the 1950s, but he still managed to create The Sun Shines Bright (1953) -- one of his favorite films, dealing with politics and race relations in the 19th century South -- Mogambo (1953), and The Searchers (1956), which is considered one of the most powerful Western dramas ever made. The Horse Soldiers (1959) showed some of Ford's flair, but was marred by production problems, and Ford later directed the John Wayne/Harry Morgan section of How the West Was Won (1963). His concern with social justice, which manifested itself in The Sun Shines Bright also became more evident during the early '60s, in films such as Sergeant Rutledge (1960), Donovan's Reef (1963), and Cheyenne Autumn (1964), all of which sought to address problems of racial prejudice.

Ford was the recipient of the first Life Achievement Award bestowed by the American Film Institute, and was the subject of Peter Bogdanovich's documentary, Directed by John Ford (1971). He died in 1973. ~ Bruce Eder, All Movie Guide

Cheyenne Autumn Buy this Movie	Donovan's Reef Buy this Movie	How the West Was Won Buy this Movie	The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Buy this Movie
Two Rode Together Buy this Movie	Sergeant Rutledge Buy this Movie	The Horse Soldiers Buy this Movie	The Last Hurrah Buy this Movie

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John Sean O'Feeney Ford (ca. 1895-1973) was an American film director who, with other pioneers in the movie industry, transformed a rudimentary entertainment medium into a highly personalized and expressive art form.

John Sean O'Feeney Ford was born around February 1, 1895, the youngest child of Irish immigrant parents. Ford graduated from high school in 1913 and attended the University of Maine. He entered the film industry in 1914 as a property man, directed his first film, Tornado, in 1917, and continued to produce silent films at the rate of five to ten each year. He established his reputation as a leading silent-film maker with The Iron Horse (1924), one of the first epic westerns, and Four Sons (1928), his initial attempt at a personal cinematic statement. Both films are now part of the silent-screen museum repertory.

But Ford was to make his great contribution as a director of talking motion pictures and in 1935 produced The Informer, often described as the first creative sound film. Dealing with a tragic incident in the Irish Rebellion of 1922, Ford and his scriptwriter transformed a melodramatic novel into a compassionate, intensely dramatic, visually expressive film. It received the Academy Award and the New York Film Critics Award for best direction. That same year Ford directed Steamboat 'Round the Bend and The Whole Town's Talking, which though neglected at the time are now considered on a par with The Informer.

With Stagecoach (1939) Ford established the American western as mythic archetype. His sculptured landscapes and pictorial compositions immediately impressed critics and audiences. With this film Ford formally renounced the realistic montage film theories of D.W. Griffith and the Russian director Sergei Eisenstein to develop a film esthetic that substituted camera movement and precise framing of spatial relationships for dramatic cutting and visual contrast. Ford utilized auditory effects to increase a scene's psychological tension.

In 1940 Ford began work on the film version of John Steinbeck's Depression novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Ignoring Steinbeck's propagandistic intentions and philosophizing, Ford concentrated on the human elements in the story and unified the episodic structure of the novel with a controlled use of visual symbolism. The film remains remarkable in several respects, most notably in Ford's ability to achieve an appropriately harsh and naturalistic style without sacrificing his poetic sensibility. This success brought the director his second Oscar and New York Film Critics Award. The following year Ford's most romantic film, How Green Was My Valley, a lyrical and nostalgic evocation of life in a Welsh mining town, earned him his third series of awards.

In addition to his work for the American Office of Strategic Services during World War II, Ford produced two excellent naval documentaries in 1945, a sex hygiene film for soldiers, and a commercial war movie, They Were Expendable (1945). After the war Ford released his second great western, My Darling Clementine (1946), which combined epic realism with poetic luminosity to create the most beautiful western to date. This was Ford's finest film. Only slightly less successful were Fort Apache (1948) and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949). His best film of the early 1950s was The Quiet Man (1952), a delightfully energetic comedy about exotic domestic rituals in a small Irish province, for which he received his fourth Oscar. The Searchers (1957) was an intense, psychological western about a group of pioneers seeking a young girl captured by the Indians. Ford next turned to the conflicts of ward politics in the Irish section of Boston in The Last Hurrah (1958).

With the exception of Sergeant Rutledge (1961) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1963), Ford's films of the 1960s were not on the same level as his earlier work. Cheyenne Autumn (1964), treating the tragedy of the American Indian, lacked his characteristic personal involvement and visual freshness. Young Cassidy, a biography of writer Sean O'Casey, was abandoned by the ailing Ford and completed by a lesser British director. Partially deaf and afflicted with poor vision (he wore a patch over one eye), Ford lived with his wife in Los Angeles during the early 1970s and died in 1973.

Over the years Ford evolved a concise cinematic vocabulary, consisting of subtle camera movement, graduated long shots, and unobtrusive editing. Notable for their realistic detail, pictorial beauty, and dynamic action sequences, his films have exerted a pronounced influence on the work of other directors. Winner of numerous awards and international citations, Ford is unique among American directors in having won the admiration of the middlebrow, establishment critics for his early social dramas (The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath) and the respect of the intellectual European and avant-garde critics for the more stylized films (My Darling Clementine, The Searchers) of his later years. As film historian Andrew Sarris recorded, "Ford developed his craft in the twenties, achieved dramatic force in the thirties, epic sweep in the forties, and symbolic evocation in the fifties."

Further Reading

The outstanding critical and biographical studies of Ford are in French. The only full-length work in English is Peter Bogdanovich, John Ford (1968). Of particular interest are sections in Roger Manvell, Film (1946); George Bluestone, Novels into Film (1957); and Andrew Sarris, The American Cinema, 1929-1968 (1968). Jean Mitry's Cahiers du cinema interview with the director can be found in Andrew Sarris, ed., Interviews with Film Directors (1968).

For more information on John Ford, visit Britannica.com.

1895–1973, American film director, b. Cape Elizabeth, Maine, as John Martin Feeney. Ford began directing in 1917 after an apprenticeship with his brother Francis. Over the next 50 years, he brought a painterly eye, an appreciation of his actors' strengths, and a deep love of Americana to over 200 feature films. Although Ford set films in other parts of the country or world, including several in Ireland, he returned to the Western repeatedly throughout his career. These films merge a beautiful pictorial style, using the buttes and mesas almost as architectural features, with stories that frequently deal with the nature of military command. Among his films are The Iron Horse (1924), The Informer (1935), Stagecoach (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), Fort Apache (1947), The Quiet Man (1952), The Searchers (1957), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Ford won six Academy Awards. During World War II he served in the U.S. navy and made the acclaimed documentary June 7th (1944).

Bibliography

See biographies by A. Sinclair (1979), S. Eyman (1999), and J. McBride (2001); studies by P. Bogdanovich (1968), J. McBride and M. Wilmington (1974), and T. Gallagher (1986).

Quotes:

"You can speak well if your tongue can deliver the message of your heart."

"Delay in vengeance delivers a heavier blow."