M. J. Frankovich
Mike Frankovich (born Mitchell John Frankovich; September 29, 1909 – January 1, 1992) was an American football player who became an actor and a movie producer. He was the adopted son of actor Joe E. Brown and his wife, Kathryn. He grew up in Los Angeles, attended Belmont High School, and played football at UCLA, later being inducted into the UCLA Athletics Hall of Fame in 1986.
He began acting in 1935, often as radio announcers or masters of ceremonies. He appeared in Abbott and Costello’s Buck Privates (1941) as the announcer who reports the army war games. During World War II, he served in the Army Air Corps. After the war, he returned to Republic Pictures and started producing, supervising four adventure serials in 1947–48.
Frankovich moved to Europe with his wife, British actress Binnie Barnes, and became managing director of Columbia Pictures in Britain in 1955. He moved back to Los Angeles in 1963, and in 1968 left his vice president role to become an independent producer at Columbia.
He served as president of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum Commission in the early 1980s, helping to bring the Los Angeles Raiders and the 1984 Summer Olympics to the city. He received the Academy Awards’ Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 1983.
On the personal side, he first married Georgiana Feagans in 1938. He later married actress Binnie Barnes in 1940, and they remained together until his death; they had three adopted children. He also produced some of Barnes’s later films, including 40 Carats (1973).
His other notable productions include Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969), Cactus Flower (1969), There’s a Girl in My Soup (1970), Butterflies Are Free (1972), The 42nd Annual Academy Awards (1970), and John Wayne’s last film, The Shootist (1976). Mike Frankovich died of pneumonia in Los Angeles on January 1, 1992, at age 82. He is buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 07:17 (CET).