Superlatives
The youngest winner was Norman Taurog who was 32 years old when he won in 1931 for Skippy. The oldest winner is Clint Eastwood who was 74 years old when he won in 2005 for Million Dollar Baby.
The youngest nominee is John Singleton who was 24 years old when he was nominated in 1992 for Boyz N the Hood. The oldest nominee was John Huston who was 79 years old when he was nominated in 1986 for Prizzi's Honor.
Eight people have been nominated for both Best Director and Best Actor for the same film. Warren Beatty did so twice (Heaven Can Wait and Reds), as did Clint Eastwood (Unforgiven and Million Dollar Baby). The other six included: Orson Welles (Citizen Kane), Laurence Olivier (Hamlet), Woody Allen (Annie Hall), Kenneth Branagh (Henry V), Kevin Costner (Dances with Wolves), and Roberto Benigni (Life Is Beautiful). No one has ever won both awards. Four won Best Director, but not Best Actor: Allen, Beatty (for Reds), Costner, and Eastwood (on both occasions). Two won Best Actor, but not Best Director: Benigni and Olivier. Finally, three lost both nominations: Beatty (for Heaven Can Wait), Branagh, and Welles (though he did win a Screenplay Oscar for Citizen Kane).
The only siblings to both be nominated are Ethan & Joel Coen, who shared nominations for No Country for Old Men (2007) and True Grit (2010). Previously, only Joel was nominated, for Fargo, in 1997. The only parent-child pair to be nominated are Francis Ford and Sofia Coppola.
Two pairs of previously married couples were nominated. Winners Kathryn Bigelow (who won in 2010) and James Cameron (who won in 1998) were previously married from 1989 to 1991. Both were nominated in 2010, the year in which Bigelow won. Another pair that have each been nominated are Sofia Coppola (nominated in 2004) and Spike Jonze, though neither won. They divorced in 2003.
No Best Director winning film is lost, though the nominee The Patriot is lost and nominee Sorrell and Son is incomplete. Drag (one of the films for which Frank Lloyd was nominated but did not win in 1929) has long been presumed lost, though there are rumors of its survival, possibly only on videotape, and the Vitaphone discs of its soundtrack survive. The Comedy Direction winner, Two Arabian Knights, was believed lost for many years but was preserved in the Howard Hughes archive and has been broadcast (along with another first-year nominee produced by Hughes and believed lost, The Racket) on Turner Classic Movies.
John Ford has won the most Best Director Oscars - four awards, followed by Frank Capra and William Wyler, with three apiece. Wyler has the most nominations with twelve.
Robert Altman, Clarence Brown, Alfred Hitchcock and King Vidor each have five nominations without a win. Brown was nominated for two films in 1930 but according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, "As allowed by the award rules for this year, a single nomination could honor work in one or more films." Altman and Vidor received honorary Oscars however, and Hitchcock received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. Martin Scorsese was also nominated five times without winning before receiving the award for his sixth nomination. Peter Weir has the record for the most nominations yet to win best Director for someone still alive, 4 nominations.
Only two directors have received consecutive Best Director awards: John Ford for 1940's The Grapes of Wrath and 1941's How Green Was My Valley, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz for 1949's A Letter to Three Wives and 1950's All About Eve.
Only one person has won the award without directing another film before or after winning: Jerome Robbins (who shared the award with co-director Robert Wise, for West Side Story).
No African-American has ever won best director, and only two have ever been nominated: John Singleton for 1991's Boyz n the Hood and Lee Daniels for 2009's Precious: Based on the Novel "Push" by Sapphire.
Ang Lee is the only Asian (and non-Caucasian) to have won the prize, for 2005's Brokeback Mountain. Other Asian nominees are Hiroshi Teshigahara for Woman of the Dunes, Akira Kurosawa for Ran, and M. Night Shyamalan for The Sixth Sense.
Kathryn Bigelow, with 2009's The Hurt Locker, is the only woman to have ever won Best Director. Other female nominees are Lina Wertmüller for 1976's Seven Beauties, Jane Campion for 1993's The Piano and Sofia Coppola for 2003's Lost in Translation.
The earliest nominee still alive is Michael Anderson, nominated in 1957, who is also the oldest still alive, born in 1920. Currently the oldest winner alive is Richard Attenborough, who was born in 1923. The earliest winner alive is Mike Nichols, who won in 1968, making him the only pre-1970s best director winner left. (Robert Wise who won twice in the 1960s died in 2005.) The last 1950s winner of Best Director to die was Delbert Mann (won 1956, died 2007).
The earliest Oscars where all 5 Best Director nominations are still alive is at the 53rd Academy Awards, while the most recent where all 5 have died is at the 38th Academy Awards.
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