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Awards and honors

Ford won a total of four Academy Awards with all of them being for Best Director, for the films The Informer (1935), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), and The Quiet Man (1952)—none of them Westerns (also starring in the last two was Maureen O'Hara, "his favorite actress"). He was also nominated as Best Director for Stagecoach (1939). He later directed two documentaries, The Battle of Midway and December 7, which both won Best Documentary, although the award was not won by him. To this day Ford holds the record for winning the most Best Director Oscars, having won the award on four occasions. William Wyler and Frank Capra come in second having won the award three times. Ford was the first director to win consecutive Best Director awards, in 1940 and 1941. This feat was later matched by Joseph L. Mankiewicz exactly ten years later, when he won consecutive awards for Best Director in 1950 and 1951. As a producer, he also received a nomination for Best Picture for The Quiet Man. In 1955 and 1957, Ford was awarded The George Eastman Award, given by George Eastman House for distinguished contribution to the art of film. He was the first recipient of the American Film Institute Life Achievement Award in 1973. Also in that year, Ford was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Richard Nixon.

Ford directed 10 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Victor McLaglen, Thomas Mitchell, Edna May Oliver, Jane Darwell, Henry Fonda, Donald Crisp, Sara Allgood, Ava Gardner, Grace Kelly and Jack Lemmon. McLaglen, Mitchell, Darwell, Crisp and Lemmon won an Oscar for one of their roles in one of Ford's movies.

In 1998, a statue of Ford was unveiled in Portland, Maine, across the street from where his father once owned a pub. Sculpted by artist George Kelly, the statue is surrounded by a memorial containing facts about Ford's life and his films.

A television special featuring Ford, John Wayne, James Stewart, and Henry Fonda was broadcast over the CBS network on December 5, 1971, called The American West of John Ford, featuring clips from Ford's career interspersed with interviews conducted by Wayne, Stewart, and Fonda, who also took turns narrating the hour-long documentary.

In 2007, Twentieth Century Fox released Ford at Fox, a DVD boxed set of 24 of Ford's films. Time magazine's Richard Corliss named it one of the "Top 10 DVDs of 2007", ranking it at No. 1.

In 2019 Jean-Christophe Klotz released the documentary film John Ford, l'homme qui inventa l'Amérique ("the man who invented America"), about his influence in the legend of the American West in films like Stagecoach (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) and Cheyenne Autumn (1964).