Frank Borzage | |
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Photoplay Magazine, 1920
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Born |
Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S. |
April 23, 1894
Died | June 19, 1962 Hollywood, California, U.S. |
(aged 68)
Occupation | Film director, actor |
Spouse(s) | Rena Rogers (married 1916, divorced 1941) Edna Stillwell Skelton (married 1945, divorced 1949) |
Frank Borzage (/bɔːrˈzeɪɡi/; April 23, 1894 – June 19, 1962) was an American film director and actor, most remembered for directing 7th Heaven (1927), Man's Castle (1933), and The Mortal Storm (1940).
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 , 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.
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 based 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 ), 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.
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.