Golden Globe Award for Best Director facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Golden Globe for Best Director – Motion Picture
The 2024 recipient: Brady Corbet
Presented by	Hollywood Foreign Press Association
Location	United States
Currently held by	Brady Corbet for The Brutalist (2024)

The Golden Globe Award for Best Director – Motion Picture is a special prize given out every year at the Golden Globe Awards. It honors the best director of a movie. This award has been presented since 1943 by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. This group is made up of journalists who write about the American movie industry for newspapers and magazines outside of North America.

A director named Elia Kazan has won this award more than anyone else. He won all four times he was nominated! Other famous directors like Clint Eastwood, Miloš Forman, David Lean, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Oliver Stone have each won three times. Steven Spielberg has been nominated the most, with fourteen nominations. Only three women have ever won this award: Barbra Streisand, Chloé Zhao, and Jane Campion.

In 1984, Barbra Streisand made history. She won the Golden Globe for Best Director for her movie Yentl. She was the first woman to ever receive this honor. For 37 years, she was the only woman to win. Then, in 2021, Chloé Zhao won for her film Nomadland. She became the second woman and the first Asian woman to win this award.

In the lists below, the names in bold with a blue background are the winners. The years shown are when the movies were released. The actual award ceremony happens in January of the next year.

About the Golden Globe for Best Director

Henry King was the first director to win this award for The Song of Bernadette (1943).

Billy Wilder won twice for The Lost Weekend (1945) and Sunset Boulevard (1950).

Elia Kazan won four times for Gentleman's Agreement (1947), On the Waterfront (1954), Baby Doll (1956), and America America (1963).

John Huston won twice for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) and Prizzi's Honor (1985).

Cecil B. DeMille won for The Greatest Show on Earth (1952).

Vincent Minnelli won for Gigi (1958).

David Lean won three times for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965).

William Wyler won for Ben-Hur (1959).

Stanley Kramer won for Judgment at Nuremberg (1961).

George Cukor won for My Fair Lady (1964).

Mike Nichols won for The Graduate (1967).

Paul Newman won for Rachel, Rachel (1968).

William Friedkin won twice for The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973).

Francis Ford Coppola won twice for The Godfather (1972) and Apocalypse Now (1979).

Roman Polanski won for Chinatown (1974).

Milos Forman won three times for One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), Amadeus (1984), and The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996).

Sidney Lumet won for Network (1976).

Robert Redford won for Ordinary People (1980).

Warren Beatty won for Reds (1981).

Richard Attenborough won for Gandhi (1982).

Barbra Streisand won for Yentl (1983).

Oliver Stone won three times for Platoon (1986), Born on the Fourth of July (1989), and JFK (1991).

Bernardo Bertolucci won for The Last Emperor (1987).

Clint Eastwood won three times for Bird (1988), Unforgiven (1992), and Million Dollar Baby (2004).

Kevin Costner won for Dances with Wolves (1990).

Steven Spielberg won three times for Schindler's List (1993), Saving Private Ryan (1998), and The Fabelmans (2022).

Robert Zemeckis won for Forrest Gump (1994).

Mel Gibson won for Braveheart (1995).

James Cameron won twice for Titanic (1997) and Avatar (2009).

Sam Mendes won twice for American Beauty (1999) and 1917 (2019).

Ang Lee won twice for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) and Brokeback Mountain (2005).

Robert Altman won for Gosford Park (2002).

Peter Jackson won for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003).

Martin Scorsese won three times for Gangs of New York (2002), The Departed (2006), and Hugo (2011).

Danny Boyle won for Slumdog Millionaire (2008).

David Fincher won for The Social Network (2010).

Ben Affleck won for Argo (2012).

Damien Chazelle won for La La Land (2016).

Alejandro González Iñárritu won for The Revenant (2015).

Guillermo del Toro won for The Shape of Water (2017).

Alfonso Cuarón won twice for Gravity (2013) and Roma (2018).

Chloé Zhao won for Nomadland (2020).

Jane Campion won for The Power of the Dog (2021).

Winners by Decade

Here are the directors who have won the Golden Globe for Best Director each year.

1940s Winners

1950s Winners

1960s Winners

1970s Winners

1980s Winners

1990s Winners

2000s Winners

2010s Winners

2020s Winners

Directors with Many Nominations

Some directors have been nominated for this award many times. Here are those with 5 or more nominations:

• Steven Spielberg (14 nominations, 3 wins)
• Martin Scorsese (10 nominations, 3 wins)
• Clint Eastwood (7 nominations, 3 wins)
• Fred Zinnemann (7 nominations, 2 wins)
• Francis Ford Coppola (6 nominations, 2 wins)
• Sidney Lumet (6 nominations, 1 win)
• Woody Allen (5 nominations, 0 wins)
• John Huston (5 nominations, 2 wins)
• Stanley Kramer (5 nominations, 1 win)
• Mike Nichols (5 nominations, 1 win)
• Billy Wilder (5 nominations, 2 wins)
• Robert Wise (5 nominations, 0 wins)

Directors with Multiple Wins

These directors have won the Golden Globe for Best Director more than once:

4 awards

• Elia Kazan

3 awards

• Clint Eastwood
• Miloš Forman
• David Lean
• Martin Scorsese
• Steven Spielberg
• Oliver Stone

2 awards

• James Cameron
• Francis Ford Coppola
• Alfonso Cuarón
• William Friedkin
• John Huston
• Ang Lee
• Sam Mendes
• Billy Wilder
• Fred Zinnemann

See also

In Spanish: Anexo:Globo de Oro al mejor director para niños

• BAFTA Award for Best Direction
• Academy Award for Best Director
• Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Director
• Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Feature Film
• Independent Spirit Award for Best Director