Frances Marion

Wrote, co-wrote or adapted some 150 screenplays from 1915 to 1939, leaving a significant stamp on American movies of both the silent and sound eras. A former journalist (she was one of the first female war correspondents), Marion entered films as an actress and made the transition to writer in 1915. She scripted vehicles for Mary Pickford and Marion Davies, among others, and was especially adept at literary adaptations; the scripts for "Stella Dallas" and "The Scarlet Letter" (both 1926) are superb examples of book-to-film restructuring. In the early 1920s Marion directed three films from her own scripts. Her third husband, from 1919 to his death in 1928, was actor Fred Thomson; her fourth, from 1930 until their divorce the following year, was director George Hill.