John Ford

John Martin Feeney (February 1, 1894 – August 31, 1973), known professionally as John Ford, was an American film director. He was one of the most important and influential filmmakers of his generation. Ford made frequent use of location shooting and wide shots, in which his characters were framed against a vast, harsh, and rugged natural terrain. He received six Academy Awards including a record four wins for Best Director for The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952). He is renowned for Westerns such as Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache (1948), The Searchers (1956), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). In a career of more than 50 years, Ford directed more than 140 films (although most of his silent films are now lost). Ford's work was held in high regard by his contemporaries, with Akira Kurosawa, Orson Welles and Ingmar Bergman naming him one of the greatest directors of all time. Early life 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). 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). 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).