Frank Lloyd

Frank William George Lloyd (2 February 1886 – 10 August 1960) was a Scottish-American film director, screenwriter, producer and actor. He was among the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and was its president from 1934 to 1935.

He is Scotland's first Academy Award winner and is unique in film history, having received three Oscar nominations in 1929 for his work on a silent film (The Divine Lady), a part-talkie (Weary River) and a full talkie (Drag). He won for The Divine Lady. He was nominated and won again in 1933 for his adaptation of Noël Coward's Cavalcade and received a further Best Director nomination in 1935 for perhaps his most successful film, Mutiny on the Bounty.

In 1957, he was awarded the George Eastman Award, given by George Eastman House for distinguished contribution to the art of film. In 1960, Lloyd received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame for his contributions to the motion pictures industry, at 6667 Hollywood Boulevard.

Lloyd was born in Cambuslang, on the outskirts of Glasgow, the youngest of seven children. His mother Jane was Scottish and his father Edmund Lloyd was Welsh, a mechanical engineer. The family travelled the country until his father was injured and gave up engineering. They settled in Shepherd's Bush, London, where the family ran a pub. Lloyd worked in a shoe shop, sang in choral groups and joined a vaudeville group.

In 1909 he immigrated to Canada where he worked on a ranch in Alberta for a year. He also erected poles and wrote for a telephone company, then joined a travelling show as an actor and singer. The show wound up in Los Angeles in 1913 and Lloyd decided to stay there and act in Hollywood films.

He began directing shorts for Paramount and moved to longer running films: The Gentleman from Indiana (1915), Jane (1915), The Reform Candidate (1916), The Tongues of Men (1916), The Call of the Cumberlands (1916), Madame la Presidente (1916) with Anna Held, The Code of Marcia Gray (1916), David Garrick (1916 film) (1916), The Making of Maddalena (1916), An International Marriage (1916), and The Stronger Love (1916). The Intrigue (1916) was produced through Pallas Films and released through Paramount. Lloyd's biographer argued his early films "are not 'masterpieces,' but they are on a par with films from other secondary directors of the period. In other words, they are not comparable to those directed by D.W. Griffith, but are as good as those directed by Allan Dwan."

Lloyd directed Sins of Her Parent (1916) at Fox, and The World and the Woman (1916) with Jeanne Eagles for Tranhouser. Back at Fox he did The Kingdom of Love (1917), and a series of films starring William Farnum" The Price of Silence (1917), A Tale of Two Cities (1917) from the novel by Charles Dickens, American Methods (1917), When a Man Sees Red (1917), Les Misérables (1917), The Heart of a Lion (1917), True Blue (1918), Riders of the Purple Sage (1918) from the novel by Zane Grey and its sequel The Rainbow Trail (1918), For Freedom (1918), and The Man Hunter (1919). Without Farnum, Lloyd directed The Blindness of Divorce (1918).

At Goldwyn he made Pitfalls of a Big City (1919),The World and Its Woman (1919), The Loves of Letty (1919), The Woman in Room 13 (1920), The Silver Horde (1920 film) (1920), Madame X (1920) with Pauline Frederick, The Great Lover (1920), A Tale of Two Worlds (1921), Roads of Destiny (1921) with Frederick, A Voice in the Dark (1921), The Invisible Power (1921), The Grim Comedian (1921), and The Man from Lost River (1921) plus The Sin Flood (1922) with Richard Dix.