2024 Judicial Council Distinguished Service Awards Presentation
John FordJohn Ford (1894-1973) is one of the most respected directors in American cinema. Along with D.W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, he was one of the first-generation pioneers who created the narrative film in America. In a career of more than 50 years, he directed over 130 films between 1917 and 1970 although most of his silent films are now lost. He won six Oscars, counting the two that he won for his WWII documentary work. Ford created so many classic Westerns such as Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache (1948), The Searchers (1956), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962), that he began to be associated with the genre.
John Ford was born John Martin Feeney in 1894 in Cape Elizabeth, Maine, which is just south of Portland. His parents, John Augustine Feeney and Barbara Curran, were Irish immigrants who arrived in the United States in 1872. They had 11 children in all, six of whom lived to adulthood. John was their tenth child, born between a girl and a boy who both died as infants. A saloon keeper and an alderman, the Feeney family pater familias was a stereotypical Irish American, dabbling in both booze and politics in Portland, where John attended high school. John Feeney followed his older brother Frank, who had renamed himself Francis Ford, to Hollywood. Frank, who was 13 years John's senior, had started as a film actor in 1909 and eventually appeared in about 500 films. He also established himself as a film director, helming almost 200 films beginning in 1912, when he shot Western shorts for Thomas H. Ince at Bison Motion Pictures. Ford started in his brother's films as an assistant, handyman, and stuntman. Francis gave his younger brother his first acting role in The Mysterious Rose (1914). Renaming himself Jack Ford, John Feeney acted in 15 of his brother's pictures from 1914 through 1916. He also appeared as a member of the Ku Klux Klan in D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), the American cinema's first certifiable blockbuster. The film was banned in Boston to forestall the possibility of its inciting racial violence and is still controversial. Young Jack Ford began to exit his brother's orbit and establish himself on his own when he moved from Bison to Universal as a director. It was by directing films from behind the camera instead of acting in them before the camera that he made his reputation. He was extraordinarily productive in his first few years as a director—he made ten films in 1917, eight in 1918 and fifteen in 1919. Ford's first feature-length production was Straight Shooting (1917) with Harry Carey, which is also his earliest complete surviving film as director. When his Western Hell Bent (1918) for Universal was released, Motion Picture News praised Ford's direction, writing, "Few directors put such sustained punch in their pictures as does this Mr. Ford." It was the ninth in a series of films featuring Harry Carey as Cheyenne Harry. Carey was the star of 25 Ford silent films. His feature Cameo Kirby (1923), starring screen idol John Gilbert - another of the few surviving Ford silents - marked his first directing credit under the name 'John Ford'. A year later, he directed his first masterpiece, the Western The Iron Horse (1924), an epic account of the building of the First transcontinental railroad. It was a large, long and difficult production, filmed on location in the Sierra Nevada. The logistics were enormous—two entire towns were constructed, there were 5000 extras, 100 cooks, 2000 rail layers, a cavalry regiment, 800 Native Americans, 1300 bison, 2000 horses, 10,000 cattle and 50,000 properties, including the original stagecoach used by Horace Greeley, Wild Bill Hickok's derringer pistol and replicas of the "Jupiter" and "119" locomotives that met at Promontory Summit when the two ends of the line were joined in 1869. The Iron Horse became one of the top-grossing films of the decade, taking over US$2 million worldwide, against a budget of $280,000. Ford made a wide range of films in this period, and he became well known for his Western and "frontier" pictures, but the genre rapidly lost its appeal for major studios in the late 1920s. Ford's last silent Western was 3 Bad Men (1926). Only ten of the more than sixty silent films John Ford made between 1917 and 1928 still survive in their entirety.
John Ford was one of the pioneer directors of sound films; he shot Fox's first song sung on screen, for his film Mother Machree (1928). In the 1930s, Ford began to create the body of work that established his greatness while working for production chief Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century Fox. Ford worked with the studio's two superstars, Shirley Temple and Will Rogers, the #1 and #2 draws at the box office. He won his first Oscar for R.K.O.'s The Informer (1935). The film also earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture and garnered a Best Actor Oscar for long-time Ford collaborator Victor McLaglen. Ford was a master of many genres, and even directed comedies such as Will Rogers's Steamboat Round the Bend (1935). The politically charged The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936)—which marked the debut with Ford of long-serving "Stock Company" player John Carradine—explored the little-known story of Samuel Mudd, a physician who was caught up in the Abraham Lincoln assassination conspiracy and consigned to an offshore prison for treating the injured John Wilkes Booth. He directed the South Seas melodrama The Hurricane (1937) and the lighthearted Shirley Temple vehicle Wee Willie Winkie (1937), each of which had a first-year US gross of more than $1 million. He directed contemporary dramas and historical epics, but strangely, he stayed away from the Western, except for Stagecoach (1939). The genre had fallen out of favour with the big studios during the 1930s and Westerns were regarded as B-grade 'pulp' movies at best. As a result, Ford shopped the project around Hollywood for almost a year. Stagecoach exploded industry prejudices by becoming both a critical and commercial hit, grossing over US$1 million in its first year (against a budget of just under $400,000), and its success helped to revitalise the moribund genre, showing that Westerns could be "intelligent, artful, great entertainment—and profitable". It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and won two Oscars, for Best Supporting Actor (Thomas Mitchell) and Best Score. The classic created the cliché of the drunken doctor (Thomas Mitchell) in an action film. In the 1940s, Ford won back-to-back Best Director Oscars for The Grapes of Wrath (1941), the screen adaptation of John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel and How Green Was My Valley (1942), based on Richard Llewellyn's memoir of his youth in the coal-mining region of Wales. Ford had sat out the First World War, the War to End All Wars, but in the 1930s, John Ford had joined the U.S. Naval Reserve as the country once again moved towards participation in a European war that seemed inevitable with the rise of Hitler in Germany. When the U.S. entered World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Ford went on active duty and headed a documentary film unit. For his Navy documentaries, he won back-to-back Academy Awards for The Battle of Midway (1942) in 1943 and for December 7th (1943) in 1944. Thus, from 1941 through 1944, John Ford won an Oscar each year for directing two feature films and two documentaries, a feat which remains unprecedented. In the mid-1940s, Ford began to focus on Westerns again, beginning with My Darling Clementine (1946) starring Linda Darnell and Henry Fonda, one of the classics of the genre. In his Westerns, he made frequent use of location shooting and wide shots, in which his characters were framed against a vast, harsh, and rugged natural terrain. Many of his Westerns featured John Wayne, whom he had first worked with on Stagecoach (1939) and who became a superstar in Howard Hawks' classic oater Red River (1948) with Montgomery Clift. Wayne appeared in Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Rio Grande (1950), the famous 'Cavalry Trilogy.'
John Ford directed sixteen features and several documentaries in the decade between 1946 and 1956. As with his pre-war career, his films alternated between (relative) box office flops and major successes, but most of his later films made a solid profit. In 1953, Ford won his sixth Best Director Oscar for his paean to the Ireland of his parents, The Quiet Man (1952), starring John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara. It's interesting to note that from 1950 through 1959, Ford made only one Western, the classic The Searchers (1956), one of the greatest examples of the genre. Starting with The Horse Soldiers (1959) which he made for the Mirisch Co. at the end of the decade, six of his last eight completed films were Westerns. His final great Western was The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) starring James Stewart and John Wayne. Jon Hopwood at IMDb: "Ford was plumbing the nature of American myth-making, and the creation of history as a historical narrative, that is, the re-creation of history, after the fact, i.e., history as something man-made, thus fallible. He had found the perfect correlative for Hollywood myth-making." The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) took on these issues with a literalness that caused many contemporary critics to dismiss the film. Donovan's Reef (1963) was Ford's last film with John Wayne. Filmed on location on the Hawaiian island of Kauai, it was a morality play disguised as an action-comedy, which subtly but sharply engaged with issues of racial bigotry, corporate connivance, greed and American beliefs of societal superiority. The supporting cast included Lee Marvin, Elizabeth Allen, Jack Warden, Dorothy Lamour, and Cesar Romero. It was also Ford's last commercial success, grossing $3.3 million against a budget of $2.6 million. Cheyenne Autumn (1964) was Ford's epic farewell to the West, which he publicly declared to be an elegy to the Native Americans. It was his last Western, his longest film and the most expensive movie of his career ($4.2 million), but it failed to recoup its costs at the box office and lost about $1 million on its first release. Ford's last completed feature film was 7 Women (1966), a drama set in about 1935, about missionary women in China trying to protect themselves from the advances of a barbaric Mongolian warlord. Anne Bancroft took over the lead role from Patricia Neal, who suffered a near-fatal stroke two days into the shooting. Ford's health deteriorated rapidly in the early 1970s; he suffered a broken hip in 1970 which put him in a wheelchair. As befitted his status as America's premier director, in 1973, John Ford was the recipient of the first Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Film Institute. President Richard Nixon presented Ford with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the U.S. Ford died in 1973, at Palm Desert and was interred in Holy Cross Cemetery in Culver City, California. John Ford had one wife, Mary Ford-McBride Smith, a son, Patrick Ford, and a daughter, Barbara Ford. His grandson, Dan Ford wrote a biography on his famous grandfather.
Sources: Jon Hopwood (IMDb), Wikipedia and IMDb.
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Curran's Restaurant
Hollywood Production
NS D29 3410 Curran,IL
IMG_8731(1) Linda Curran
WA: Charles and Mary Louise Curran House NR
It begins...
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Fight the power!
Been a while, Curran
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How I roll
Didn't get too bad
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Terry Curran - Sheffield Wednesday
Broxb. 80.17 — Speeches by J. P. Curran (Dublin, 1808).
Shadow Decorations II
Diana Rigg in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)Diana Rigg in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (Peter R. Hunt, 1969).
English actress Diana Rigg (1938-2020) was well known as Emma Peel in the classic TV series The Avengers (1965-1968), and as Lady Olenna Tyrell in Game of Thrones (2013-2017). In between she had an extensive career in film and theatre. Between 1959 and 1964, she performed for the Royal Shakespeare Company and won several awards, including a Tony and an Emmy award. In the cinema, she made her mark as Countess Teresa di Vicenzo, the only Bond girl to ever get 007 to the altar, in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969).
Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg was born in Doncaster, then in the West Riding of Yorkshire, now in South Yorkshire, in 1938. Her parents were railway engineer Louis Rigg and his wife Beryl Hilda Rigg née Helliwell. Between the ages of two months and eight years, Rigg lived in Bikaner, India, where her father was employed as a railway executive. She was then sent to a private boarding school, where she suffered through discipline and rigours until one of her teachers introduced her to the world of the theatre. From 1955 till 1957, she trained as an actress at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, where Glenda Jackson and Siân Phillips were classmates. Rigg made her professional stage debut in the RADA production of 'The Caucasian Chalk Circle' at the York Festival in 1957. In 1959, she joined the Royal Shakespeare Company and stayed there till 1964. Her deeply distinctive voice, auburn red hair, and towering height (5'8") assured her such dynamic roles as Viola in 'Twelfth Night' and Cordelia in 'King Lear'. In 1965, actress Elizabeth Shepherd was dropped from a popular BBC TV series after filming two episodes. Rigg auditioned for the role on a whim, without ever having seen the programme. Hal Erickson at AllMovie: “She was selected to replace Honor Blackman on the popular tongue-in-cheek TV-adventure series The Avengers and for the next two years captivated little boys of all ages with her energetic portrayal of coolheaded, leather-clad karate expert Mrs. Emma Peel.” Fans were fond of the banter between Mrs. Peel and Patrick Macnee’s John Steed, delivered with champagne crispness. From 1965 till 1967, Rigg appeared in 51 episodes of the cult series. She became soured on the series when she discovered that she was earning less than some of the cameramen. After holding out for a pay raise, she returned for a second season, which would be her last. Then film stardom followed. She became a Bond girl in On Her Majesty's Secret Service (Peter R. Hunt, 1969), playing Countess Teresa di Vicenzo a.k.a. Tracy Bond, 007's only wife, opposite George Lazenby. Although its cinema release was not as lucrative as its predecessor You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty's Secret Service was still one of the top performing films of the year. Critical reviews upon release were mixed, but the film's reputation has improved over time. Donald Guarisco at AllMovie: “Diana Rigg also makes a vivid impression as Tracy, easily the toughest and most resourceful of all Bond heroines”. Rigg’s other films from this period include her film debut A Midsummer Night's Dream (Peter Hall, 1968), the black comedy The Assassination Bureau (Basil Dearden, 1969) with Oliver Reed, Julius Caesar (Stuart Burge, 1970) featuring John Gielgud, and the satire The Hospital (Arthur Hiller, 1971). All her films were well regarded but no box office hits.
In 1970, ‘theatre animal’ Diana Rigg returned to the stage in the Ronald Millar play 'Abelard and Heloise' in London. According to IMDb, she was the first major actor (along with co-star Keith Michell) to appear nude on stage in this production. She made her Broadway debut with the play in 1971, earning the first of three Tony Award nominations for Best Actress in a Play. She received her second nomination in 1975, for 'The Misanthrope'. A member of the National Theatre Company at the Old Vic from 1972 to 1975, Rigg took leading roles in premiere productions of two Tom Stoppard plays, Dorothy Moore in 'Jumpers' (1972) and Ruth Carson in 'Night and Day' (1978). In the cinema she appeared in such films as the hilarious horror-comedy Theatre of Blood (Douglas Hickox, 1973) as Vincent Price’s loyal but homicidal daughter, and the disastrous musical A Little Night Music (Harold Prince, 1977), starring Elizabeth Taylor. On television, she appeared as the title character in The Marquise (1980), a TV adaptation of play by Noël Coward. In 1981 she appeared on TV in the title role of Hedda Gabler, and in the cinema as Lady Holiday in The Great Muppet Caper (Jim Henson, 1981). The following year she received acclaim for her performance as glamorous actress Arlena Stuart Marshall in the film adaptation of Agatha Christie's Evil Under the Sun (Guy Hamilton, 1982), with Peter Ustinov as Hercule Poirot. Craig Butler at AllMovie: “Diana Rigg and Maggie Smith in particular make scenery chewing seem the most natural way of acting in a movie. (Riggs' performance of You're the Top - constantly interrupted by Smith - is particularly memorable.)” Also in 1982, Rigg published the hilarious book 'No Turn Unstoned', in which she gathered together the worst reviews ever received by the world's best actors. The book, which included a review by New York Magazine’s John Simon with uncouth remarks about her nude scene in 'Abelard and Heloise', became a bestseller and cult favourite. She appeared as Regan, the king's treacherous second daughter, in a TV production of King Lear (1983), featuring Laurence Olivier. She costarred with Denholm Elliot in a television version of Dickens' Bleak House (1985), and played the Evil Queen, Snow White's evil stepmother, in a film adaptation of Snow White (Michael Berz, 1987). In 1987 she took a leading role in the West End production of Stephen Sondheim's musical 'Follies'. Then Rigg played obsessive mother Helena Vesey, who was prepared to do anything, even murder, to keep control of her son in the TV Mini-series Mother Love (1989). For her role, she won the BAFTA TV Award for Best Actress. In 1988, Rigg was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) and in 1994, a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE).
In the 1990s, Diana Rigg had more triumphs on stage with her role as Medea at the Almeida Theatre in Islington in 1992. The production transferred in 1993 to the Wyndham's Theatre and in 1994 to Broadway. Rigg received the Tony Award for Best Actress gfor this performance. Other triumphs were her Mother Courage at the National Theatre in 1995 and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Almeida Theatre in 1996. She won an Emmy Award for her role as the sinister Mrs. Danvers in Rebecca (Jim O’Brien, 1997). She also appeared in The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders (David Attwood, 1996), and as the eccentric old amateur detective Mrs. Bradley in The Mrs Bradley Mysteries (James Hawes, Martin Hutchings, 1998-2000). On stage, Rigg appeared in 2004 as Violet Venable in Tennessee Williams's play Suddenly Last Summer, and in 2007 as Huma Rojo in All About My Mother, based on the film by Pedro Almodóvar. She appeared in 2008 in The Cherry Orchard, and in 2009 in Noël Coward's Hay Fever. In 2011 she played Mrs Higgins in Pygmalion, opposite Rupert Everett and Kara Tointon, having played Eliza Doolittle 37 years earlier at the Albery Theatre. In the cinema she could be seen in as Grandmamma in the family film Heidi (Paul Marcus, 2005) and as a French Mother Superior who presides over a Chinese orphanage in The Painted Veil (John Curran, 2006) with Naomi Watts and Edward Norton. In the 1960s, Rigg lived for eight years with actor/director Philip Saville. She was married to Menachem Gueffen, an Israeli painter, from 1973 until their divorce in 1976, and to Archibald Stirling, a theatrical producer and former officer in the Scots Guards, in 1982, until their divorce in 1990. With Stirling, Rigg has a daughter, actress Rachael Stirling (1977). In 2013, she appeared with her daughter Rachel in the hit series Doctor Who in the episode The Crimson Horror (Saul Metzstein, 2013). The same year, Rigg secured a recurring role in the third season of the HBO series Game of Thrones (2013-present). She portrayed Lady Olenna Tyrell, a witty and sarcastic political mastermind popularly known as the Queen of Thorns, the grandmother of regular character Margaery Tyrell. Her performance was well received and earned her an Emmy nomination in 2013. She reprised her role in the seasons four, five and six, in an expanded role from the books. In October 2015, to mark 50 years of Emma Peel, the BFI (British Film Institute) screened an episode of The Avengers followed by an onstage interview with Rigg about her time on the cult 1960s TV show. In 2020, Diana Rigg passed away in London. She was 82. Her daughter, Rachael Stirling, said that the cause of death was cancer. Till her death, she kept appearing for the cameras. Her last TV series was Black Narcissus, in which she appeared as Mother Dorothea, and her final film was the Horror-thriller Last Night in Soho (Edgar Wright, 2021).
Sources: Stuart Jeffries (The Guardian), Hal Erickson (AllMovie), Donald Guarisco (AllMovie), Craig Butler (AllMovie), Pedro Borges (IMDb), TCM, Wikipedia, and IMDb.
And, please check out our blog European Film Star Postcards .
Rheta and Keith Curran
Nancy Curran
NS 251 at Curran - Pt. 2
NS 251 at Curran
NS 41A at Curran
Sunday Drive - New Salem Church Road
