Frank Marshall

Biography

Frank Marshall (born September 13, 1946, in Glendale, California) is an American film producer and director who has received five Academy Award nominations for Best Picture. Most of his work has been on the producing side, and he has been linked to some of Hollywood's best-known franchises and box-office hits since the early 1970s. His career shows how a producer can build a long run inside the studio system.

The son of guitarist, conductor and composer Jack Marshall, he studied at UCLA and graduated in political science in 1968. In 1966 he met the director Peter Bogdanovich, who brought him onto Targets (1968), his first real training in production. Over the next few years he moved up from production assistant to associate producer on several Bogdanovich films, among them The Last Picture Show (1971), where he also worked as location manager and took a small acting role.

From there he worked with Martin Scorsese on the concert documentary The Last Waltz (1978) and with Walter Hill on The Driver (1978) and The Warriors (1979). His name became closely tied to Steven Spielberg and George Lucas when he produced Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). That same year, he co-founded Amblin Entertainment with his future wife Kathleen Kennedy and Spielberg. In 1991 he and Kennedy set up The Kennedy/Marshall Company, which made films such as The Sixth Sense, Seabiscuit, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and the Bourne series.

His feature directing debut came with the thriller Arachnophobia (1990). He went on to direct Alive (1993), Congo (1995) and Eight Below (2006), alongside documentaries and television work. Since becoming sole principal of the company, he has widened its output to include series, documentaries and Broadway musicals, and he produced Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in 2023.

His legacy rests mainly on his producing, but his work extends beyond film. He served on the board of the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee and has won awards in music, television and theatre, including a Tony. He is one of the few people to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony.

Key films

• Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981): producer of the first Indiana Jones film, which cemented his working relationship with Spielberg and Lucas.
• The Color Purple (1985): producer of Spielberg's adaptation of Alice Walker's novel, one of his Best Picture nominations.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988): a mix of live action and animation that became a landmark of 1980s effects work.
• The Sixth Sense (1999): produced through his company, and another of his Best Picture nominations.
• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008): David Fincher's film, which added another Best Picture nomination to his record.
• Arachnophobia (1990): his feature directing debut, a thriller about a colony of spiders.