Frank Borzage was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, on April 23, 1893. He was of Italian, Swiss, and Austrian ancestry, the fourth of eight children of an Italian speaking father and German speaking mother. By the age of 13 he was working in a gold mine and helping his father as a construction worker.  It wasn’t long, however, until he began feeling drawn to the theater, and he joined a touring company in his teens.

Borzage began his work in film in the early 1910s, working as an extra in westerns. In 1913, at the age of 20, he went to work for producer Thomas Ince, and began performing in more important supporting roles. He became a star with 1914’s The Wrath of the Gods, in which he played the romantic lead in an interracial love story. He continued to act for several years, and in 1916 added directing to his resume with his debut behind the camera, The Pitch o’ Chance. Borzage became a prominent director in the 1920s with films like Humoresque and The Nth Commandment.

He gave up acting and began to direct full-time in the 1920s, making a string of successful films including The River, Secrets, and Lazybones. In 1927 he made Seventh Heaven, starring Janet Gaynor and Charles Farrell. For this film, he won the very first Academy Award for Best Director. He’d go on to make several more films with Gaynor and Farrell, including Street Angel and Lucky Star.

Borzage easily made the transition to sound with Liliom in 1930. In 1931 he directed the Depression era romance Bad Girl, and picked up his second Oscar for Best Director.  Throughout the 1930s he made many wonderful romantic melodramas, including Man’s Castle, Mannequin, and Little Man, What Now? He spent the early 1930s working for different studios, but by the middle of the decade he had settled at MGM, and the studio’s stars, such as Joan Crawford and Margaret Sullavan, became fixtures in his films.

The 1940s marked a change in Borzage’s filmmaking. Not only did he switch studios (to RKO) in 1945, the tone of his films changed and he began making more varied films. From war, to melodrama, to noir, Borzage tried a little bit of everything. Flight Command, The Spanish Main, Moonrise, and I’ve Always Loved You were all very different films, but all distinctly Borzage.

He continued to work in films and television, directing movies like China Doll and installments for the program Screen Directors Playhouse, until his death from cancer on June 19, 1962.