John Ford

John Ford (February 1, 1894 – August 31, 1973) was an American film director. He is renowned both for Westerns such as Stagecoach (1939), The Searchers (1956), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), as well as adaptations of classic 20th-century American novels such as the film The Grapes of Wrath (1940). His four Academy Awards for Best Director (in 1935, 1940, 1941, and 1952) remain a record. One of the films for which he won the award, How Green Was My Valley, also won Best Picture.

In a career that spanned 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 film-makers of his generation. Ford's work was held in high regard by his colleagues, with Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman among those who have named him one of the greatest directors of all time.

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

John Ford (dramatist)

For other uses see John Ford (disambiguation)

John Ford (1586 – ca. 1639) was an English playwright and poet of the Jacobean and Caroline eras born in Ilsington in Devon.

Origins

John Ford was baptised 17 April 1586 at Ilsington Church, Devon, and was the second son of Thomas Ford (1556–1610) of Bagtor in the parish of Ilsington, by his wife Elizabeth Popham (d.1629) of the Popham family of Huntworth in Somerset. Her monument exists in Ilsington Church. Thomas Ford's grandfather was John Ford (d.1538) of Ashburton (the son and heir of William Ford of Chagford,) who purchased the estate of Bagtor in the parish of Ilsington, which his male heirs successively made their seat. The Elizabethan mansion of the Fords survives today at Bagtor as the service wing of a later house appended in about 1700.

Life and work

Ford left home to study in London, although more specific details are unclear — a sixteen-year-old John Ford of Devon was admitted to Exeter College, Oxford on 26 March 1601, but this was when the dramatist had not yet reached his sixteenth birthday. He joined an institution that was a prestigious law school but also a centre of literary and dramatic activity — the Middle Temple. A prominent junior member in 1601 was the playwright John Marston. (It is unknown whether Ford ever actually studied law while a resident of the Middle Temple, or whether he was strictly a gentleman boarder, which was a common arrangement at the time).