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:
“The golden mean in ethics, as in physics, is the centre of the system and that about which all revolve, and though to a distant and plodding planet it be an uttermost extreme, yet one day, when that planet’s year is completed, it will be found to be central.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Even to this day it is easier than it ought to be for me to get a rise out of an American by telling him something about himself which is equally true about every human being on the face of the globe. He at once resents this as a disparagement and an assertion on my part that people in other parts of the globe are not like that, and are loftily superior to such weaknesses.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“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)
“The director is simply the audience. So the terrible burden of the director is to take the place of that yawning vacuum, to be the audience and to select from what happens during the day which movement shall be a disaster and which a gala night. His job is to preside over accidents.”
—Orson Welles (1915–1984)