Ford was born John Martin "Jack" Feeney in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, to John Augustine Feeney and Barbara "Abbey" Curran, on February 1, 1894. 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 a local (impoverished) gentry family, the Morrises of Spiddal (headed at present by Lord Killanin).
John Augustine and Barbara Curran arrived in Boston and Portland respectively in May and June 1872. They married in 1875 and became American citizens five years later on September 11, 1880. They had eleven children: Mamie (Mary Agnes), born 1876; Delia (Edith), 1878-1881; Patrick; Francis Ford, 1881-1953; Bridget, 1883-1884; Barbara, born and died 1888; Edward, born 1889; Josephine, born 1891; Hannah (Joanna), born and died 1892; John Martin, 1894-1973; and Daniel, born and died 1896 (or 1898). John Augustine lived in the Munjoy Hill neighborhood of Portland, Maine, with his family, and would try farming, fishing, working for the gas company, running a saloon, and being an alderman.
Education
Ford attended Portland High School, Portland, Maine, where he was a successful fullback and defensive tackle. He earned the nickname "Bull" because of the way he would lower his helmet and charge the line. He graduated from high school in 1913.
Ford 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. 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.
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 on August 31, 1973.
John transformed a rudimentary entertainment medium into a highly personalized and expressive art form. He is renowned both for his original movies as well as adaptations of classic 20th-century American novels such as the film The Grapes of Wrath (1940). In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Ford directed more than 140 films and he is widely regarded as one of the most important and influential filmmakers 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.
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.
A statue of Ford in Portland, Maine depicts him sitting in a director's chair. ‘The John Ford Award’ was created to honor pioneers in American filmmaking.
Early in life, Ford's politics were conventionally progressive; his favorite presidents were Democrats Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy and Republican Abraham Lincoln. But despite these leanings, many thought he was a Republican because of his long association with actors John Wayne, James Stewart, Maureen O'Hara and Ward Bond.
As time went on, however, Ford became more publicly allied with the Republican Party, declaring himself a 'Maine Republican' in 1947. He claimed he didn't vote for either Goldwater or Johnson in 1964, but he supported Richard Nixon in 1968 and became a supporter of the Vietnam War.
Views
Quotations:
“Anybody can direct a picture once they know the fundamentals. Directing is not a mystery, it's not an art. The main thing about directing is: photograph the people's eyes.”
“You can speak well if your tongue can deliver the message of your heart.”
“I am ... a mushroom; On whom the dew of heaven drops now and then.”
“I didn't show up at the ceremony to collect any of my first three Oscars. Once I went fishing, another time there was a war on, and on another occasion, I remember, I was suddenly taken drunk.”
“Electronics is clearly the winner of the day.”
“Love is dead; let lovers' eyes, Locked in endless dreams, The extremes of all extremes, Ope no more, for now Love dies.”
“Honour, How much we fight with weakness to preserve thee!”
“What is done, is done: Spend not the time in tears, but seek for justice.”
“Truth is child of Time."
Personality
Ford was renowned for his intense personality and his many idiosyncrasies and eccentricities. From the early Thirties onwards, he always wore dark glasses and a patch over his left eye, which was only partly to protect his poor eyesight. He was an inveterate pipe-smoker and while he was shooting he would chew on a linen handkerchief - each morning his wife would give him a dozen fresh handkerchiefs, but by the end of a day's filming the corners of all of them would be chewed to shreds. He always had music played on the set and would routinely break for tea (Earl Grey) at mid-afternoon every day during filming. He discouraged chatter and disliked bad language on set; its use, especially in front of a woman, would typically result in the offender being thrown off the production. He rarely drank during the making of a film, but when a production wrapped he would often lock himself in his study, wrapped only in a sheet, and go on a solitary drinking binge for several days, followed by routine contrition and a vow never to drink again. He was extremely sensitive to criticism and was always particularly angered by any comparison between his work and that of his elder brother Francis. He rarely attended premieres or award ceremonies, although his Oscars and other awards were proudly displayed on the mantel in his home.
There were occasional rumors about his sexual preferences, and in her 2004 autobiography 'Tis Herself, Maureen O'Hara recalled seeing Ford kissing a famous male actor (whom she did not name) in his office at Columbia Studios.
He was famously untidy, and his study was always littered with books, papers and clothes. He bought a brand new Rolls-Royce in the 1930s, but never rode in it because his wife, Mary, would not let him smoke in it. His own car, a battered Ford roadster, was so dilapidated and messy that he was once late for a studio meeting because the guard at the studio gate did not believe that the real John Ford would drive such a car, and refused to let him in. He was also notorious for his antipathy towards studio executives: on one early film for Fox he is said to have ordered a guard to keep studio boss Darryl F. Zanuck off the set, and on another occasion he brought an executive in front of the crew, stood him in profile and announced, "This is an associate producer - take a good look because you won't be seeing him on this picture again."
Ford was highly intelligent, erudite, sensitive and sentimental, but to protect himself in the cutthroat atmosphere of Hollywood he cultivated the image of a "tough, two-fisted, hard-drinking Irish sonofabitch."
Connections
Ford married Mary McBride Smith on July 3, 1920, and they had two children. His daughter Barbara was married to singer and actor Ken Curtis from 1952 to 1964. The marriage between Ford and Smith lasted for life despite various issues, one of which could have proved problematic from the start, this being that John Ford was Catholic while she was a non-Catholic divorcée. What difficulty was caused by the two marrying is unclear as the level of John Ford's commitment to the Catholic faith is disputed. A strain would have been Ford's many extramarital relationships.