Frank Borzage

About Frank Borzage

Who is it?: Film Director, Actor
Birth Day: April 23, 1894
Birth Place: Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S., United States
Died On: June 19, 1962(1962-06-19) (aged 68)\nHollywood, California, U.S.
Birth Sign: Taurus
Occupation: Film director, actor
Spouse(s): Rena Rogers (married 1916, divorced 1941) Edna Stillwell Skelton (married 1945, divorced 1949)

Frank Borzage Net Worth

Frank Borzage was born on April 23, 1894 in Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S., United States, is Film Director, Actor. Frank Borzage was an American actor and director. He is counted as one of the most successful directors during the early twentieth century. He started with silent movies and then made the transition to talkies with a great deal of success. During his career spanning 40 years he made more than 100 movies and was known as the best director during the 1920s and the 1930s. He was the first to win the Academy Award for ‘Best Director’ and won it again for a second time later. He came from a very poor family and during childhood he had to endure the death of six of his siblings from influenza. Though being very poor Frank’s family was extremely tight knit which reflected in his films as the importance of having a loving and strong family in spite of being extremely poor. He became interested in acting and theater while he was still a boy and worked in a silver mine to earn money for an acting course.
Frank Borzage is a member of Film & Theater Personalities

💰Frank Borzage Net worth: $1.1 Million

Some Frank Borzage images

Biography/Timeline

1859

Frank Borzage's Father, Luigi Borzaga, was born in Ronzone (then Austrian Empire, now Italy) in 1859. As a stonemason, he sometimes worked in Switzerland; he met his Future wife, Maria Ruegg (1860, Ricken (de), Switzerland – 1947, Los Angeles), where she worked in a silk factory. Borzaga emigrated to Hazleton, Pennsylvania in the early 1880s where he worked as a coal miner. He brought his fiancee to the United States and they married in Hazleton in 1883.

1885

Their first child, Henry, was born in 1885. The Borzaga family moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, where Frank Borzage was born in 1894, and the family remained there until 1919. The couple had fourteen children, eight of whom survived childhood: Henry (1885–1971), Mary Emma (1886–1906), Bill (1892–1973), Frank, Daniel (1896–1975, a performer and member of the John Ford Stock Company), Lew (1898–1974), Dolly (1901–2002) and Sue (1905–1998). Luigi Borzaga died in Los Angeles in a car accident in 1934; his wife Maria (Frank's mother) died of cancer in 1947.

1912

In 1912, Frank Borzage found employment as an actor in Hollywood; he continued to work as an actor until 1917. His directorial debut came in 1915 with the film, The Pitch o' Chance.

1916

On June 7, 1916, Borzage married vaudeville and film Actress Lorena "Rena" Rogers in Los Angeles and remained married until 1941. In 1945, he married Edna Stillwell Skelton, the ex-wife of Comedian Red Skelton; they were divorced in 1949. Borzage died of cancer in 1962, aged 68, and was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Glendale, California.

1917

He directed 14 films between 1917 and 1919 alone, his greatest success in the silent era was with Humoresque, a box office winner starring Vera Gordon.

1920

Borzage was a successful Director throughout the 1920s but reached his peak in the late silent and early sound era. Absorbing visual influences from the German Director F.W. Murnau, who was also resident at Fox at this time, he developed his own style of lushly visual Romanticism in a hugely successful series of films starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell, including 7th Heaven (1927), for which he won the first Academy Award for Best Director, Street Angel (1928) and Lucky Star (1929). He won a second Oscar for 1931's Bad Girl.

1933

Borzage's trademark was intense identification with the feelings of young lovers in the face of adversity, with love in his films triumphing over such trials as World War I (7th Heaven and A Farewell to Arms), disability (Lucky Star), the Depression (Man's Castle), a thinly disguised version of the Titanic disaster in History Is Made at Night, and the rise of Nazism, a theme which Borzage had virtually to himself among Hollywood filmmakers from Little Man, What Now? (1933) to Three Comrades (1938) and The Mortal Storm (1940).

1937

His work took a turn to religiosity in such films as Green Light (1937), Strange Cargo (1940) and The Big Fisherman (1959). Of his later work only the film noir Moonrise (1948) has enjoyed much critical acclaim.

1948

After 1948, his output was sporadic. He was the original Director of Journey Beneath the Desert (1961), but was too sick to continue, and Edgar G. Ulmer took over. Borzage was uncredited for the sequences he did direct.

1955

In 1955 and 1957, Borzage was awarded The George Eastman Award, given by George Eastman House for distinguished contribution to the art of film.

1960

For his contributions to the film industry, Borzage received a motion pictures star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960. The star is located at 6300 Hollywood Boulevard.