Frank Russell Capra was an Italian-born American film director, producer and writer. Capra won three Academy Awards for Best Director from six nominations, along with three other Oscar wins from nine nominations in other categories. Among his leading films were It Happened One Night, You Can’t Take It with You, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. He served as President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
About Frank Capra in brief
Frank Russell Capra was an Italian-born American film director, producer and writer. Capra won three Academy Awards for Best Director from six nominations, along with three other Oscar wins from nine nominations in other categories. Among his leading films were It Happened One Night, You Can’t Take It with You, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. During World War II, Capra served in the U.S. Army Signal Corps and produced propaganda films, such as the Why We Fight series. He served as President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, worked alongside the Writers Guild of America, and was head of the Directors Guild ofAmerica. He was the youngest of seven children of Salvatore Capra, a fruit grower, and the former Rosaria “Serah” Nicolosi. His rags-to-riches story has led film historians such as Ian Freer to consider him the \”American Dream personified. \”Capra’s name represents his family’s closeness to the land, and means \”goat\”. He was born Francesco Rosario Capra in Bisacquino, a village near Palermo, Sicily, Italy, and raised in Los Angeles from the age of five. He studied chemical engineering and graduated in the spring of 1918. He later wrote that his college education had “changed his whole viewpoint on life from an alley rat of a cultured person to the viewpoint of an intelligent, cultured person of an advanced age” He was commissioned in the United States Army as a second lieutenant, having completed the ROTC campus on campus in San Francisco.
His father died during the war in an accident, and Capra contracted Spanish flu and was medically discharged to return home to live with his mother. He became a naturalized citizen in 1920, taking the name Frank Capra. He died of lung cancer in 1973, aged 89. He is survived by his wife, three children, and two grandchildren. He had a son, Michael, who died in 2008. He also had a daughter, Jennifer, who lives in New York City with her husband, Roberta, and their two sons, Michael and Michael Jr. The Capra family moved to Los Angeles in 1903, when he was five. The family settled in an Italian ghetto, which Capra described in his autobiography as an Italian “ghetto’”. He described the experience as one of his worst experiences: You’re all together—you have no privacy. You have a cot. Very few people have trunks or anything that takes up space. They have just what they can carry in their hands or in a bag. Nobody takes their clothes off, and it stinks like hell. It’s the most degrading place you could ever be. It’s a Wonderful Life, which was released in 1939. In ensuing decades, however, It’s a Wonderful life and other Capra films were revisited favorably by critics.
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