John Ford for The Grapes of Wrath and How Green was My Valley in 1940/41, Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives and All About Eve in 1949/50, and Alejandro González Iñárritu for Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) and The Revenant in 2014/2015.

Ford won two additional Best Director Oscars, for The Informer (1935) and The Quiet Man (1935). He was also the favorite to win the Oscar in 1939 for Stagecoach (for which he received one of his four New York Film Critics Awards) but lost that statuette to Victor Fleming in the Oscar sweep of Gone With the Wind. Those and his nomination for producing the Best Picture nominee The Quiet Man (which lost the Oscar to The Greatest Show on Earth) represent the sum total of Ford's nominations despite his helming such classics as The Lost Patrol (1934), My Darling Clementine (1946), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Mister Roberts (1955), The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). During World War II he joined the navy and headed a documentary film crew unit. Two of the films he made, The Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7th (1943), won back-to-back Oscars for Best Short Subject Documentary.

Mankiewicz also won Oscars for writing the screenplays for his two award-winning directorial achievements, and had previously been nominated for his screenplay of Skippy (1931) and for producing the Best Picture nominee The Philadelphia Story in 1940. 1950 was a particularly good year for him since in addition to his two All About Eve statuettes, he was nominated for the Best Screenplay award for No Way Out. He would go onto be be nominated twice more as a director (for Five Fingers, 1952 and for his final film Sleuth, 1972) and once more for Best Screenplay (The Barefoot Contessa, 1954). He also directed such classics as The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), Julius Caesar (1953), Guys and Dolls (1955) as well as the trouble-plagued epic Cleopatra (1963). His brother Herman J. Mankiewicz was also an Oscar winner, for co-writing the screenplay of Citizen Kane (1941) with Orson Welles.
 

Iñárritu won three Oscars in 2015 for Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), for writing and directing as well as producing the Best Picture, and won his second consecutive Best Director award for The Revenant the following year in addition to being nominated for the Oscar for producing The Revenant, losing that trophy to the producers of Spotlight. He got his first taste of Oscar gold for in both categories in 2006, for Babel (losing the awards that year to The Departed). He also directed Best Foreign Film nominees Amores Perros in (2000) and Biutiful (2010). Iñárritu continued his "golden boy" relationship with the Academy the year after his back-to-back directing prizes by taking home a Special Award for his Virtual Reality achievement in the installation Carne y Arena (Virtually Present, Physically Invisible).

 

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