John Ford
John Ford statue in Portland. Photo: Wikimedia.
John Martin Feeney, professionally known as John Ford, was a film director and producer during the Golden Age of Hollywood. He was born in Cape Elizabeth in 1894 to Irish immigrants and was one of eleven children, and one of six to survive childhood. His father, John Feeney, was from Spiddal, County Galway, and was one of thousands of Irish people who fled during the English-precipitated famine. His mother, Barbara Curran, was from Kilronan, a town on the island of Inishmore in Galway Bay. His Irish heritage was important to Ford and following his first visit to Ireland in the 1920s, Ford became a financial supporter of the IRA.
Ford grew up in the Munjoy Hill neighborhood of Portland, attended Portland High School, and played on the football team. After high school, Ford moved to California to start his film career. He got his start as an assistant and stunt-double for his older brother, Francis Ford. Although they did not work together for long, Ford worked his way up to cameraman and eventually worked up to becoming a director. Along the way, he also occasionally took on acting roles, including an uncredited role as a Klansman in Birth of a Nation.
Ford's career spanned five decades and included directing over 130 films. Many of his films from the silent film era were lost to time, but much of his later work is still accessible—the majority of which were westerns. Ford frequently worked with actors who became prolific through their shared work, such as Henry Fonda, Jimmy Stewart, and John Wayne. Some of Ford's most prolific work include The Informer (1935) (which heavily influenced Citizen Kane), Stagecoach (1939), , The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green was my Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952).
During World War II, Ford worked for the Office of Strategic Services making documentaries. The topics he covered included hygiene for soldiers and propaganda. Ford claimed that he filmed the D-Day operation on Omaha Beach, but raw footage of the operation was never released.
Ford passed in 1973 as one of the most influential film directors in American history. His artistic style inspired others, including Akira Kurosawa and Orson Welles. Eleven of Ford's films are on the National Film Registry, and a statue of him is located in Gorham's Corner in Portland.
