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Howard Hanks

Birth Name: Howard Winchester Hawks
Nickname: -
Date of Birth: 30 May 1896, Goshen, Indiana, USA
Date of Death: 26 December 1977, California, USA (after a fall)
Sometimes Credited as: -
Spouses: Dee Hartford (20 February 1953 - 1959) (divorced) 1 child
Nancy Gross (11 December 1941 - 9 June 1949) (divorced) 1 child
Athole Shearer (28 May 1928 - 5 December 1940) (divorced) 2 children

Although his friend, contemporary, and the director arguably closest to him in terms of his talent and output, John Ford, told him that it was he, Howard Hanks, and not Ford, who should have won the 1941 Best Director Academy Award for "Sergeant York," the great Hawks never won an Oscar in competition and was nominated for Best Director only that one time despite making some of the best films in the Hollywood canon. The Academy eventually made up for the oversight in 1974 by voting him an honorary Academy Award, in the midst of a two-decade long critical revival that has gone on for yet another two decades.

To many cineastes, Howard Hawks is one of the faces of American film and would be carved on any film pantheon's Mt. Rushmore honoring America's greatest directors beside his friend Ford and Orson Welles (the other great director that Ford beat out for the 1941 Oscar).

The young Howard Hawks grew accustomed to getting what he wanted and believed his grandfather when C.W. told him he was the best and that he could do anything. Howard also likely inherited C.W.'s propensity for telling whopping lies with a straight face, a trait that had bedeviled many film historians ever since.

Hawks' definition of a good director was "someone who doesn't annoy you." When Hawks was awarded his lifetime achievement Academy Award, the citation referred to the director as "a giant of the American cinema whose pictures, taken as a whole, represent one of the most consistent, vivid, and varied bodies of work in world cinema." It is a fitting epitaph for one of the greatest directors in the history of American, and world cinema.