Who has won the most 'Best Director' Oscars Awards?

Credit: Far Out/Academy Awards

Every filmmaker to have won the ‘Best Director’ Oscar more than once

Thu 11 May 2023 17:30, UK

The Academy Award for ‘Best Director’, officially known as the ‘Academy Award of Merit for Directing’, is awarded by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) at the annual Oscars ceremony. Traditionally, at the event, the trophy is presented by the previous winner. Undoubtedly the pinnacle of achievements regarding directing accolades, from John Ford to the Daniels, a host of seminal auteurs have been bestowed with the honour. Nominees are selected by a single transferable vote within the directors’ branch of AMPAS, with winners then chosen by a plurality vote from the entire breadth of eligible voting academy members.

The inaugural Academy Awards was in 1929, with the ‘Best Director’ awards split into two categories for both ‘Dramatic’ and ‘Comedy’. In the former, Frank Borzage took home the award for 7th Heaven, and Lewis Milestone won the latter with Two Arabian Knights. However, for all subsequent ceremonies, the categories merged for ease.

Interestingly, for the first 11 years of the Oscars, directors were permitted to be nominated for multiple movies in the same calendar year. This changed after Michael Curtiz was nominated for two titles, Angels with Dirty Faces and Four Daughters, at the 11th ceremony in 1939. The revised rule stipulated that a single director could only be nominated for one film at each edition.

This rule was then amended, although the only filmmaker to receive multiple nominations in the same year since that moment is Steven Soderbergh in 2000 for Erin Brockovich and Traffic. He won ‘Best Director’ for the latter, a crime thriller, boasting an ensemble cast including Don Cheadle, Benicio del Toro and Michael Douglas. As a side note, ‘Best Director’ and the other most lauded accolade at the ceremony, ‘Best Picture’, have been closely linked since it began. Of the 88 titles that won ‘Best Picture’ and were nominated for ‘Best Director’, 67 took home the award.

Since the inaugural Oscars, 74 directors or teams have been honoured with ‘Best Director’. The most recent winners were the Daniels – the duo of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert – for Everything Everywhere All at Once. They are the third duo to win, after Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, for the classic 1961 musical West Side Story and the Coen brothers for their 2007 adaptations of Cormac McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men.

Only a select few can brag about having won ‘Best Director’ more than once, though. The auteur with the most wins is the late John Ford, a master of the western genre. His four winning titles were 1935’s The Informer, 1940’s The Grapes of Wrath, 1941’s How Green Was My Valley and 1952’s The Quiet Man. He also won ‘Best Picture’ for the 1940 and 1952 films.

Following Ford, two men sit behind him in second with three wins a piece. These are Italian-American Frank Capra, the man behind the timeless 1946 Christmas standard It’s a Wonderful Life. His wins in ‘Best Director’ were for 1934’s It Happened One Night, 1936’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and 1938’s You Can’t Take It with You. The other director with three wins is William Wyler. Another classic filmmaker, his trio of wins were for 1942’s Mrs. Miniver, 1946’s The Best Years of Our Lives, and 1959’s Charlton Heston-starring Ben-Hur.

Behind these, a selection of familiar faces have had two wins for ‘Best Director’. These include Ang Lee, Clint Eastwood, Miloš Forman, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, Steven Spielberg, Oliver Stone and Alejandro G. Iñárritu. Eastwood’s pair of wins were for two very different films, 1992’s epic western, Unforgiven and 2004’s sports drama Million Dollar Baby.

Find the complete list of every person to have won ‘Best Director’ more than once below.