Frances Marion

Frances Marion—born Marion Benson Owens on November 18, 1888, in San Francisco, California—was an American screenwriter, director, journalist, and author. She is remembered as one of the most celebrated female screenwriters of the 20th century, alongside June Mathis and Anita Loos, and wrote more than 300 scripts over her career. She also became the first writer to win two Academy Awards.

Her parents were Minnie Benson and Len Douglas Owens, an advertising and billboard executive who later developed the Aetna Springs Resort in Pope Valley, California. Marion had an older sister, Maude, and a younger brother, Len. When her father’s health declined, she lived in Pope Valley, which later became the setting for her 1935 book *Valley People*. Her parents divorced when she was nearly ten, and her father remarried a few years later. She was sent to a Christian boarding school after being suspended from elementary school at age twelve for drawing satirical cartoons of her teacher. At sixteen, she transferred to the Mark Hopkins Art Institute in San Francisco, attending from 1904 until the school was destroyed by the fire that followed the 1906 earthquake. In 1906, she married her 19-year-old art instructor, Wesley de Lappe. Following advice from family friend Jack London to “go forth and live” in order to capture the human spirit in her art, she took odd jobs as a telephone operator and fruit cannery worker.

Around 1907 to 1911, Marion worked in San Francisco as a photographer’s assistant to Arnold Genthe, experimenting with photographic layouts and color film. She later worked as a commercial artist for the Western Pacific Railroad and, at age 19, as a cub reporter for the *San Francisco Examiner*. After moving to Los Angeles in 1912, she worked as a poster artist for the Morosco Theater and for an advertising firm doing commercial layouts. In the summer of 1914, she was hired as a writing assistant, actress, and general assistant by Lois Weber Productions, a film company owned and run by pioneering female director Lois Weber. She could have acted but preferred working behind the camera, learning screenwriting from Weber. When Weber moved to Universal and offered to bring Marion along, Marion declined. Soon after, her close friend Mary Pickford offered her a job at Famous Players–Lasky.