Frank Urson on AllMovie

The multi-talented Frank Urson began his screen career as an actor with the Thanhouser company, appearing opposite the company's leading lady Florence LaBadie in the California-lensed Her Gallant Knight (1913). Leaving Thanhouser and acting, Urson became a cameraman for Margarita Fischer at Mutual and Wallace Reid at Paramount. For the latter, he also contributed the screenplay to The Lottery Man (1919). Reid, one of the great matinee idols of the era, awarded Urson full directorship of several of his later films, including The Hell Diggers (1921) and The Love Special (1921); Urson also directed the waning Mary Miles Minter in such programmers as Tillie and South of Suva (both 1922). After Reid's tragic death and Miles Minter's "exile" in the wake of one of Hollywood's greatest scandals -- the murder of director William Desmond Taylor -- Urson collaborated with director Marshall Neilan on Minnie (1922) and The Stranger's Banquet (1923), the latter of which he co-wrote. After co-directing (with Paul Iribe) several Raymond Griffith comedies, Ursan began a collaboration with director Cecil B. DeMille, whom he assisted on The Volga Boatman (1926) and The Godless Girl (released 1929), and for whom he directed the silent version of Maurine Watson's Broadway play Chicago (1927; remade as Roxie Hart in 1942). Urson may have been on the verge of becoming an important director in his own right when he tragically drowned in Michigan's Indian Lake in August of 1928.