The only director to have won four Oscars for ‘Best Director’
One of the most prestigious awards on offer at the Academy Awards each year is ‘Best Director’, awarded to the filmmaker who has proven their abilities in directing actors and crew members in their particular film entry.
When it comes to those who have worked diligently enough – and who can also be considered fortunate enough – to have won multiple ‘Best Director’ awards at the Oscars, there are several filmmakers with two prizes to their names from across the decades.
Amongst them are Billy Wilder, Elia Kazan, David Lean, Milos Forman, Oliver Stone, Clint Eastwood, Stephen Spielberg and Ang Lee. But there are two directors who have amazingly won not two but three ‘Best Director’ Oscars throughout their careers. They are Frank Capra, who won the award in 1934, 1936 and 1938 and William Wyler, who took home the prize in 1942, 1946 and 1952.
At the top of the pile, though, sits one director in particular, with an impressive four ‘Best Director awards, more than any other filmmaker, dead or alive. It is, of course, John Ford, widely considered one of the most significant and influential filmmakers of his generation.
He first took home the ‘Best Director’ Oscar in 1935 for his thriller drama The Informer, which was adapted for the screen from Liam O’Flaherty’s 1925 novel of the same by Dudley Nichols. It focuses on the Irish War of Independence and a Republican man who informs the enemy about his ex-comrades until guilt consumes him.
Five years later, Ford again won ‘Best Director’, that time for his 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s masterpiece novel The Grapes of Wrath. Ford directed Henry Fonda in the role of Tom Joad in a tale about an Oklahoman family who head off in search of a better life in California when their farm is repossessed.
Just a year after The Grapes of Wrath, Ford again scooped the award for How Green Was My Valley. Though the setting was different, the emotion was the same, and the 1941 film focuses on a working-class mining family in Wales in the Victorian age and how the loss of such a way of life affected the small-town Welsh communities.
Finally, Ford earned his record-breaking fourth ‘Best Director’ award with 1952’s The Quiet Man, where he cast his frequent collaborator John Wayne in the lead role along with Maureen O’Hara, Barry Fitzgerald and Ward Bond. The film is based on a 1933 short story by Saturday Evening Post and has Ford sitting comfortably at the top of the Academy Awards directors chart.
