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 and/or award:
“All in the golden afternoon
Full leisurely we glide;
For both our oars, with little skill,
By little arms are plied,
While little hands make vain pretense
Our wanderings to guide.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“It might be seen by what tenure men held the earth. The smallest stream is mediterranean sea, a smaller ocean creek within the land, where men may steer by their farm bounds and cottage lights. For my own part, but for the geographers, I should hardly have known how large a portion of our globe is water, my life has chiefly passed within so deep a cove. Yet I have sometimes ventured as far as to the mouth of my Snug Harbor.”
—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)