Italian-American filmmaker who won five Oscars with movies that were idealistic and unabashedly sentimental.. He made such classics as “It Happened One Night,” 1934, “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” and “It’s a Wonderful Life,” 1935-1939. He was the president of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, and received the Life Achievement award in 1982.
Capra was born in Sicily to a poor farm family in Palermo. He was named for his grandfather, who designed and built churches, the youngest son of a illiterate peasant who came to America by steerage when the boy was six. They settled in Los Angeles where his dad made a meager living picking oranges, with a young Capra vowing to rise from poverty and reading voraciously. During elementary school, he sold newspapers, beating out other newsboys in his neighborhood. He attended Manual Arts high school and graduated at the early age of 16. He was the only child of seven who went on to college.
Capra worked his way through the California Institute of Technology, where he won a scholarship to travel abroad. While in college, he worked as a waiter, managed the student laundry, wiped engines at a local power plant, and still graduated in 1918. In his senior year, he became the captain of the ROTC unit, and did research on an incendiary bomb that won a commendation from the National Research Council. Upon graduation, he enlisted in the army as a private.
When he left the army, for two years he pruned fruit trees and sold the works of Elbert Hubbard, an author and publisher, door to door. The following year he went to work for Paul Gerson Studios where he did odd jobs, bluffing his way into silent movies in 1922. Living in San Francisco, he got a job as a director for “Fulta Fisher’s Boarding House” a one reel black and white picture. He soon began to write comedies for Mack Sennett, moving on to those for Harry Langdon.
In 1927 Capra directed a film called “For the Love O’ Mike” which died at the box office. When he became a director at Columbia, he moved into his own niche, producing his wonderful, timeless classics.
In 1932, he married. His presidency of the Directors Guild of America lasted from 1936-1940. In the early sixties, he was called hopelessly old fashioned, but this turned out to be a momentary change in public tastes. His last picture was “Pocketful of Miracles,” 1961.
Capra was an articulate, effervescent, and competitive man with a short, wiry build and square jaw. His wife Lucille died in 1984 after 52 years of marriage, with three children and ten grandchildren surviving. Until he suffered a series of minor strokes, he toured college campuses, criticizing Hollywood and encouraging students to pursue their own creative vision. He settled in Fallbrook, CA where he was the director of the Fallbrook Public Utility District. Capra wrote his autobiography in 1971, “The Name Above the Title,” and Joseph McBridge wrote “Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success,” in 1993
Capra died peacefully at his home 9/02/1991, 9:30 AM, La Quinta, CA.
Link to Wikipedia biography