John Ford is, arguably, The Great American Director. When Orson Welles, who repeatedly screened Fords Stagecoach 1939 as a crash course in filmmaking before helming his first film, Citizen Kane 1941, was asked who his three favorite directors were, he answered, John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.Along with D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, the firstgeneration pioneers who created the narrative film in America, if not the world, Ford who came of age when movie production began shifting from its New YorkNew Jersey base to California in the second decade of the 20th Century ranks with William Wyler, Frank Capra and Howard Hawks as not only being among the greatest of American directors, but as an artist who helped define what America was on the silver screen. Fords cinematic art is as much a part of Americana as a Frederic Remington painting of the Old West, a subject both lovingly portrayed in their respective media. Ford was said to have possessed a painterly gift as a filmmaker. Such was the respect he was held by his peers in the industry, he won four Academy Awards as Best Director, a record that still stands.The legend known as John Ford was born John Martin Feeney on February 1, 1894 many sources say 1895 and that is the date that is chiseled into his tombstone in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, which is just south of Portland, the northeastern seaport where his parents had settled. His parents were Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States in 1872. They had 11 children in all, six of whom lived to adulthood. John was their tenth child, born between a girl and a boy who both died as infants. A saloonkeeper and an alderman, the Feeney family pater familias was a stereotypical Irish American, dabbling in both booze and politics in Portland, where John attended high school.

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