David Frankel

David Frankel is an American director whose work moves between television, studio comedy, drama, and literary adaptation. He made his feature directing debut with Miami Rhapsody (1995), a romantic comedy starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Antonio Banderas, Mia Farrow, and Kevin Pollak. Frankel later directed The Devil Wears Prada (2006), the adaptation of Lauren Weisberger’s novel scripted by Aline Brosh McKenna. Meryl Streep plays Miranda Priestly, the formidable editor of the fictional fashion magazine Runway, while Anne Hathaway plays Andrea Sachs, a journalism graduate hired as Miranda’s assistant. The film also features Emily Blunt and Stanley Tucci, and became a major commercial success. Frankel directed Marley & Me (2008), based on John Grogan’s memoir about a Labrador retriever and the Grogan family. Owen Wilson and Jennifer Aniston portray John and Jenny Grogan. The film opened on Christmas Day and became one of 2008’s highest-grossing films in the United States. His later features include The Big Year (2011), in which Steve Martin, Jack Black, and Owen Wilson play competitive birders pursuing a North American birding record. In Hope Springs (2012), Meryl Streep and Tommy Lee Jones play a long-married Massachusetts couple who travel to Maine for intensive counseling conducted by a therapist played by Steve Carell. Frankel directed One Chance (2013), a biographical film about British singer Paul Potts, with James Corden in the lead role. The story follows Potts from his work as a mobile-phone salesman to his 2007 victory on Britain’s Got Talent. Frankel also directed Collateral Beauty (2016), starring Will Smith as a bereaved advertising executive whose colleagues arrange encounters intended to confront his letters to Love, Time, and Death. On television, Frankel was an executive producer and director on HBO’s Entourage, whose early episodes established the series’ Los Angeles setting around actor Vincent Chase and his longtime friends. He directed episodes of Sex and the City and won a Primetime Emmy Award for directing the episode “The Caste System.” In that episode, Carrie Bradshaw dates a wealthy man whose social circle exposes class tensions, while Miranda confronts workplace assumptions after dating a bartender. Frankel has repeatedly worked with performers across projects: Streep led both The Devil Wears Prada and Hope Springs; Owen Wilson appeared in Marley & Me and The Big Year. His films often use recognizably specific institutions—Runway magazine, competitive birding, marriage therapy, and a televised talent contest—as pressure points for characters facing professional or personal change.