Frances Marion (1888–1973)

Frances Marion was born Marion Benson Owens in San Francisco, California. She went to art school at 16 and then went to work as a journalist, serving as a war correspondent in Europe during World War I. On her return to the USA, she moved to Los Angeles, where she got a job as an assistant to pioneering female film director Lois Weber. As "Frances Marion," she wrote scripts for films for Mary Pickford, including Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and The Poor Little Rich Girl, as well as for numerous other successful films of the 1920s and 1930s. She tried her hand at directing for the first time with Just Around the Corner, and then directed Mary Pickford in The Love Light (1921). Frances became the first woman to win an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay in 1930 for The Big House. After winning the Academy Award for Best Story for The Champ in 1932, she was the first woman to win two Oscars. During a career that spanned the silent and sound eras, she was credited with writing scripts for more than 130 films, including Stella Dallas (1925); Son of the Sheik (1926), starring Rudolph Valentino; Dinner at Eight (1933), and Camille (1937). She was married four times, and became such a close friend of Mary Pickford's that in 1920, when she married actor Fred Thomson, the couple honeymooned together with Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. She taught screenwriting at the University of Southern California, and wrote How to Write and Sell Film Stories (1937). She left Hollywood in 1946 to devote her time to writing stage plays and novels.

Her memoir Off With Their Heads: A Serio-Comic Tale of Hollywood, was published in 1972.