The Grapes of Wrath

Son of Irish immigrants, John Ford was born John Feeney in Maine in 1894. In 1914, he left for California where he began a career as an actor alongside his brother, the actor and director Francis Ford, from whom he took his professional name. In the following years, he trained on the sets as an assistant director and cameraman, before starting to direct. After making dozens of silent films, many of which have since disappeared, he confirmed his success with the transition to talkies and co-founded the Screen Directors Guild in 1935. From Stagecoach in 1939, he made a series of classics and became famous for his westerns. During the Second World War, Ford created the Field Photographic Branch, using Hollywood talents to document the fighting (he lost an eye), the landing, the death camps, and the Nuremberg trials. After the war, he returned to making fiction films while opposing the McCarthyism. He continued to make films at a steady pace until the 1960s, creating masterpieces with an increasingly humanistic tone.