BIO: Film Director John Ford (1894/5-1963), nee Sean O'Fienne. John Feeney was born into a family of immigrants from the Galway coast and grew up in a fiercely Irish enclave in Portland, Maine, the son of a saloonkeeper and a mother who never learned to read or write English. As the director John Ford, he was the recipient of six Academy Awards, none of which he accepted in person, and is recognized as one of the finest artists ever to have worked in films. For someone who was in many ways coarse and sentimental, and given to fabricating stories about his own life, he could create works that were luminous, enchanting, and profound. He became famous for staging outdoor motion pictures with a keen sense of background and deep feeling for people. An Irishman who knew him said that the great tragedy of his life was that he had not been born in Ireland. He was a dramatist of myths whose truest subject was America itself and the West as it exists in the American imagination. He was a mass of contradictions, some of which derived from his! double sense of himself as at once American and Irish. He grew up in American film, following his brother Francis (who changed the family name) to Hollywood as a teenager. In 1924, he created one of the masterpieces of the silent screen, "The Iron Horse" (1924). Ford made many films of which some of the most notable include "The Informer" (1930s), "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940), "The Hurricane" (1937), "Stagecoach" (1939), "How Green Was My Valley" (1941), "Fort Apache" (1948), "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon" (1949), "Rio Grande" (1950), "Wagonmaster" (1951), "Mogambo" (1952) "The Quiet Man" (1952), "The Last Hurrah" (1958), "The Horse Soldiers" (1959) and "Cheyenne Autumn" (1964). Ford directed more than 200 motion pictures since entering the industry in 1917. In 1953, the Screen Directors Guild awarded him the first D. W. Griffith Memorial Award, for "inspirational service to the film industry." It is reminded that Jack Feeney who crossed the continent on the railroad that an uncle may or may not have helped to build, with stories of four uncles who may or may not have fought in the Civil War - among the orange groves of Hollywood and the stark grandeur of Monument Valley -became John Ford, the director. After he had struck it rich, the master of a medium which he had helped to create, he bought a two-masted, hundred-foot ketch, painted her green and white and called her the "Araner." -- Excepts, "The Irish In America" and "World Book Encyclopedia."