- published: 13 Apr 2015
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Frank Borzage (/bɔːrˈzeɪɡiː/; April 23, 1894 – June 19, 1962) was an American film director and actor, most remembered for directing 7th Heaven (1927), Street Angel (1928), and The Mortal Storm (1940).
Frank Borzage's father, Luigi Borzaga, was born in Ronzone, (then Austria-Hungary, now Italy) in 1859. As a stonemason, he sometimes worked in Switzerland; he met his future wife, Maria Ruegg (b. 1860, Ricken, Switzerland, – d. 1947, Los Angeles), where she worked in a silk factory. Borzaga emigrated to Hazleton, Pennsylvania in the early 1880s where he worked as a coal miner. He brought his fiancee to the United States and they married in Hazleton in 1883.
Their first child, Henry, was born in 1885. The Borzaga family moved to Salt Lake City, Utah, where Frank Borzage was born in 1893 (according to IMDb.com), and the family remained based until 1919. The couple had fourteen children, eight of whom survived childhood: Henry (1885–1971), Mary Emma (1886–1906), Bill (1892–1973), Frank, Daniel (1896–1975, a performer and member of the John Ford Stock Company), Lew (1898–1974), Dolly (1901–2002) and Sue (1905–1998). Luigi Borzaga died in Los Angeles in a car accident in 1934; his wife Maria (Frank's mother) died of cancer in 1947.