William Wyler "Mrs. Miniver". He is tied with Frank Capra and behind John Ford, who won four Oscars in this category. He is also only director in Academy history to direct three Best Picture-winning films (the three for which he won Best Director), and directed more Best Picture nominees than anyone else (thirteen). He has the distinction of having directed more actors to Oscar-nominated performances than any other director in history: thirty-six. Out of these nominees, fourteen went on to win Oscars, also a record. He received the fourth AFI Life Achievement Award in 1976. Among those who thanked him for directing
Mrs. Ted Bliss to the character of Mrs. Bliss. Walter Goodman, a television critic for "The New York Times", mentions in his review that "[the book] may not be Stanley Elkin's best, but it is a smart, generous, melancholy, funny, even elegiac work by a prodigious practitioner". "Publishers Weekly" writes that "Elkin is at his best here, blessed with the gift of one-liner insight and a definite, if reluctantly exercised, ability to tug on a reader's heartstrings". Elkin won the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award in the fiction category for the novel. The book was nominated along with "Independence Day" (by Richard