Frances Marion

Journalist

• Born: November 18, 1887?
• Birthplace: San Francisco, California
• Died: May 12, 1973
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Biography

Frances Marion Owens was born on November 18, 1886, in San Francisco, California, to entrepreneur and advertising executive Len Douglas Owens and pianist Minnie Hall. The middle of three children in this artistic family, Frances Marion was named after Francis Marion, a paternal ancestor and hero of the Revolutionary War known as Swamp Fox. Frances was exposed to an interesting group of relatives, attending séances with her aunt and hearing sailing tales and adventures from her uncle.

Marion exhibited her artistic talents at an early age and was sent to Mark Hopkins Art School. She then later attended the University of California at Berkeley and the Sorbonne, in Paris. In 1902, she dropped out of Berkeley to marry art instructor Wesley de Lappé, but the marriage fell apart two years later.

Marion went on to work in a variety of professions including a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner (where she befriended actress Marie Dressler), an advertisement designer, a commercial artist, a painter, and a model. She married Robert Pike, but they too divorced. She moved to Hollywood where she painted posters of actors for Oliver Morosco’s company and made her acting debut for Hobart Bosworth as lead in The Wild Girl from the Hills (1915), making fifteen dollars a week.

Interested in more creative ends, Marion had quickly learned from Bosworth the important tasks of the film business—publicity, continuity, and writing—and was allowed to take on the crucial job of designing scenarios for silent films, the equivalent of the modern screenwriting. In 1915, Marion wrote her first scenario for The Foundling, a work that starred Mary Pickford. Although the film was destroyed in a studio fire, Marion took her experience to World Films and to William A. Brady, who hired her for $250 a week.

Over the next three years, Marion would design popular scenarios for successful films and had committed to Mary Pickford to write roles specifically for the famous silent screen star. When World War I began, Marion went to work on the Committee on Public Information. In Germany, she met soldier Fred Thompson, a chaplain in the Army and an actor at home. They married in 1920. Following the war, they settled in the United States, where she gave birth to two sons and where she worked to help Thompson become a film star in Westerns.

Marion wrote a number of screenplays, adaptations, and stories, and she was the author of the silent version of Stella Dallas (1925). Marion designed film scenarios for Lillian Gish, wrote and painted under the pseudonym Frank M. Clifton, and adapted screenplays (such as The Son of the Sheik in 1926 and The Cossacks in 1928). Also in 1928, Fred Thompson died of pneumonia.

By 1930 Marion had remarried, having two more children, Fred and Richard, with director George Hill (though they would divorce a year later), and by 1930 she had also begun writing screenplays for talkies, producing such well-received works as Anna Christie with Greta Garbo, a film based on Eugene O’Neill’s play. Marion won the Academy Award for Best Writing for The Big House (1930) and for The Champ (1931), and a 1933 Best Writing nomination for The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933) before she retired from the film industry. She was making $1,700 a week at this point in here career. She then wrote several novels, a manual for newcomer screenwriters, and her memoirs, including the autobiography Off with Their Heads (1972).