This page lists the winners of and nominees for the Golden Globe Award for Best Director. Since its inception in 1943, it has been presented annually by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, an organization composed of journalists who cover the United States film industry for publications based outside North America.
Having won all four of his nominations, Elia Kazan has been honored most often in this category. Martin Scorsese, Clint Eastwood, David Lean, Miloš Forman, and Oliver Stone tie for second place with three wins each. Steven Spielberg has had the most nominations (ten) but and has received the award twice. Barbra Streisand is the only woman to have won the award.
In the following lists, the first names, listed in bold type against a blue background, are the winners, and the following names are the remaining nominees. The years given are those in which the films under consideration were released, not the year of the ceremony, which takes place in January of the following year.
Notes:
- "†" indicates an Academy Award-winning performance.
- "§" indicates a Golden Globe Award-winning performance that was not nominated for an Academy Award.
Famous quotes containing the words golden, globe, award and/or director:
“All the chosen coin of fancy
flashing out from many a golden phrase;”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)
“Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as this is?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The award of a pure gold medal for poetry would flatter the recipient unduly: no poem ever attains such carat purity.”
—Robert Graves (1895–1985)
“He wrote me sad Mother’s Day stories. He’d always kill me in the stories and tell me how bad he felt about it. It was enough to bring a tear to a mother’s eye.”
—Connie Zastoupil, U.S. mother of Quentin Tarantino, director of film Pulp Fiction. Rolling Stone, p. 76 (December 29, 1994)