Billy Wilder

Billy Wilder
Birth name:	Samuel Wilder
Date of birth:	June 22 1906(1906-06-22)
Birth location:	Sucha, Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now Sucha Beskidzka, Poland)
Date of death:	March 27 2002 (age 95)
Death location:	Beverly Hills, California, U.S.
Academy Awards:	Best Director 1945 The Lost Weekend 1960 The Apartment Best Picture 1960 The Apartment Best Adapted Screenplay 1945 The Lost Weekend Best Original Screenplay 1950 Sunset Blvd. 1960 The Apartment Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award 1988 Lifetime achievement
Spouse:	Judith Coppicus (1936-1946) Audrey Young (1949-2002)

Billy Wilder (June 22 1906 – March 27 2002) was an Austrian-born, Jewish-American journalist, screenwriter, film director, and producer whose career spanned more than 50 years and 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age. Many of Wilder's films achieved both critical and public acclaim.

Life and career

Origins

Born Samuel Wilder in Sucha Beskidzka, Austria-Hungary (now Poland) to Max Wilder and Eugenia Dittler, Wilder was nicknamed Billie by his mother (he changed that to "Billy" after arriving in America). Soon the family moved to Vienna, where Wilder attended school. After dropping out of the University of Vienna, Wilder became a journalist. To advance his career Wilder decided to move to Berlin, Germany.

Berlin

While in Berlin, before achieving success as a writer, Wilder allegedly worked as a taxi dancer. After writing crime and sports stories as a stringer for local newspapers, he was eventually offered a regular job at a Berlin tabloid. Developing an interest in film, he began working as a screenwriter. He collaborated with several other tyros (with Fred Zinnemann and Robert Siodmak, on the 1929 feature, People on Sunday). After the rise of Adolf Hitler, Wilder, who was Jewish, left for Paris and then the United States. His mother, grandmother and stepfather died at Auschwitz concentration camp.

Hollywood career

After arriving in Hollywood in 1933, Wilder shared an apartment with fellow émigré Peter Lorre, and continued his career as a screenwriter. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1934. Wilder's first significant success was Ninotchka, a collaboration with fellow German immigrant Ernst Lubitsch. Released in 1939, this screwball comedy starred Greta Garbo (generally known as a tragic heroine in film melodramas), and was popularly and critically acclaimed. With the byline, "Garbo Laughs!", it also took Garbo's career in a new direction. The film also marked Wilder's first Academy Award nomination, which he shared with co-writer Charles Brackett. For twelve years Wilder co-wrote many of his films with Brackett, from 1938 through 1950. He followed Ninotchka with a series of box office hits in 1942, including his Hold Back the Dawn and Ball of Fire, as well as his directorial feature debut, The Major and the Minor.

Wilder established his directorial reputation after helming Double Indemnity (1944), an early film noir he co-wrote with mystery novelist Raymond Chandler, with whom he did not get along. Double Indemnity not only set conventions for the noir genre (such as "venetian blind" lighting and voice-over narration), but was also a landmark in the battle against Hollywood censorship. The original James M. Cain novel Double Indemnity featured two love triangles and a murder plotted for insurance money. The book was highly popular with the reading public, but had been considered unfilmable under the Hays Code, because adultery was central to its plot. Double Indemnity is credited by some as the first true film noir, combining the stylistic elements of Citizen Kane with the narrative elements of Maltese Falcon.

Two years later, Wilder earned the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for the adaptation of a Charles R. Jackson story The Lost Weekend. This was the first major American film to make a serious examination of alcoholism. Another dark and cynical film Wilder cowrote and directed was the critically acclaimed Sunset Boulevard in 1950, which paired rising star William Holden with Gloria Swanson. Swanson played Norma Desmond, a reclusive silent film star who dreams of a comeback; Holden is an aspiring screenwriter and becomes a kept man.

In 1951, Wilder followed up Sunset Boulevard with the remarkably cynical Ace in the Hole (aka The Big Carnival), a tale of media exploitation of a mining accident. It was a critical and commercial failure, but its reputation has grown over the years. In the fifties, Wilder also directed two vibrant adaptations of Broadway plays, the POW drama Stalag 17 (1953), which resulted in a Best Actor Oscar for William Holden, and the Agatha Christie mystery Witness for the Prosecution (1957).

In 1959 Wilder introduced crossdressing to American film audiences with Some Like It Hot. In this comedy Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis play musicians on the run from a Chicago gang, who disguise themselves as women and become romantically involved with Marilyn Monroe and Joe E. Brown.

From the mid-1950s on, Wilder made mostly comedies. Among the classics Wilder produced in this period are the farces The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959), satires such as The Apartment (1960), and the romantic comedy Sabrina (1954). Wilder's humor is cynical and sometimes sardonic. In Love in the Afternoon (1957), a young and innocent Audrey Hepburn who doesn't want to be young or innocent wins playboy Gary Cooper by pretending to be a married woman in search of extramarital amusement. Even Wilder's warmest comedy, The Apartment, features an attempted suicide on Christmas Eve.

In 1959, Wilder teamed with writer-producer I.A.L. Diamond, a collaboration that remained until the end of both men's careers. After winning three Academy Awards for 1960's The Apartment (for Best Picture, Director, and Screenplay), Wilder's career slowed. His Cold War farce One, Two, Three (1961) featured a rousing comic performance by James Cagney, but was followed by the lesser films Irma la Douce and Kiss Me, Stupid. Wilder garnered his last Oscar nomination for his screenplay The Fortune Cookie in 1966. His 1970 film The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was intended as a major roadshow release, but was heavily cut by the studio and has never been fully restored. Later films such as Fedora and Buddy, Buddy failed to impress critics or the public.

Directoral Style

Wilder's directoral choices reflected his belief in the primacy of writing. He avoided the exuberant cinematography of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles because, in Wilder's opinion, shots that called attention to themselves would distract the audience from the story. Wilder's pictures have tight plotting and memorable dialogue. Wilder filmed in black and white whenever studios would let him. Despite his conservative directoral style, his subject matter often pushed the boundaries of mainstream entertainment.

He was skilled at working with actors, coaxing silent era legends Gloria Swanson and Erich von Stroheim out of retirement for roles in Sunset Boulevard. For Stalag 17, Wilder squeezed an Oscar-winning performance out of a reluctant William Holden (Holden wanted to make his character more likeable; Wilder refused). Wilder sometimes cast against type for major parts such as Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity and The Apartment. Many today know MacMurray as a wholesome family man from the television series My Three Sons, but he played a womanizing schemer in Wilder's films. Humphrey Bogart shed his tough guy image to give one of his warmest performances in Sabrina. James Cagney, not usually known for comedy, was memorable in a high-octane comic role for Wilder's One, Two, Three.

Wilder mentored Jack Lemmon and was the first director to pair him with Walter Matthau, in The Fortune Cookie (1966). Wilder had great respect for Lemmon, calling him the hardest working actor he had ever met.

Wilder's films often lacked any discernible political tone or sympathies, which was not unintentional. He was less interested in current political fashions than in human nature and the issues that confronted ordinary people. He was not affected by the Hollywood blacklist, and had little sympathy for those who were. Of the blacklisted 'Hollywood Ten' Wilder famously quipped, "Of the ten, two had talent, and the rest were just unfriendly".

Later life

In 1988, Wilder was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Billy Wilder died in 2002 of pneumonia at the age of 95 after battling health problems, including cancer, in Los Angeles, California, and was interred in the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery in Westwood, Los Angeles, California.

Legacy

Wilder holds a significant place in the history of Hollywood censorship for expanding the range of acceptable subject matter. He is responsible for two of the film noir era's most definitive films in Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard. Along with Woody Allen, he leads the list of films on the American Film Institute's list of 100 funniest American films with 5 films written and holds the honor of holding the top spot with Some Like it Hot. Also on the list are The Apartment and The Seven Year Itch which he directed, and Ball of Fire and Ninotchka which he co-wrote. The AFI has ranked four of Wilder's films among their top 100 American films of the twentieth century. These are: Sunset Boulevard (no. 12), Some Like It Hot (14), Double Indemnity (38), and The Apartment (93).

Trivia

• Wilder reveled in poking fun at those who took politics too seriously. In Ball of Fire, his burlesque queen 'Sugarpuss' points at her sore throat and complains "Pink? It's as red as the Daily Worker and twice as sore". Later, she gives the overbearing and unsmiling housemaid the name 'Franco'.

• Wilder is sometimes confused with director William Wyler; the confusion is understandable, as both were German-speaking Jews with similar backgrounds and names. However, their output as directors was quite different, with Wyler preferring to direct epics and heavy dramas and Wilder noted for his comedies and Film Noir type dramas.

• Billy Wilder's twelve Academy Award nominations for screenwriting were a record until 1997 when Woody Allen received a thirteenth nomination for Deconstructing Harry.

• Billy Wilder is one of only four people who have won three Academy Awards for producing, directing, and writing the same film (The Apartment).

• Billy Wilder once said: "My English is a mixture between Arnold Schwarzenegger and Archbishop Desmond Tutu."

• Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba said in his acceptance speech for the 1993 Best Non-English Speaking Film Oscar "I would like to believe in God in order to thank him. But I just believe in Billy Wilder... so, thank you Mr Wilder". According to Trueba, Wilder called him the day after and told him: "Fernando, it's God".

• He died the same day as Milton Berle and Dudley Moore. Next day, French top-ranking newspaper Le Monde titled its first-page obituary "Billy Wilder is dead. Nobody is perfect." This was a reference to the famous closing line of his film Some Like it Hot.

• Billy Wilder was the Editors Supervisor in the 1945 US Army Signal Corps documentary/propaganda film "Death Mills"

• Cat Power sings a song entitled "Billy Dead Wilder"

Academy Awards

Year	Award	Work
Won:
1946	Best Screenplay	The Lost Weekend
1946	Best Director	The Lost Weekend
1951	Best Original Screenplay	Sunset Blvd.
1961	Best Original Screenplay	The Apartment
1961	Best Director	The Apartment
1961	Best Picture	The Apartment
1988	Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award	Lifetime Achievement
Nominated:
1940	Best Screenplay	Ninotchka
1942	Best Screenplay	Hold Back the Dawn
1942	Best Original Story	Ball of Fire
1945	Best Screenplay	Double Indemnity
1945	Best Director	Double Indemnity
1949	Best Screenplay	A Foreign Affair
1951	Best Director	Sunset Blvd.
1952	Best Story and Screenplay	Ace in the Hole
1954	Best Director	Stalag 17
1955	Best Screenplay	Sabrina
1955	Best Director	Sabrina
1958	Best Director	Witness for the Prosecution
1960	Best Screenplay	Some Like It Hot
1960	Best Director	Some Like It Hot
1967	Best Original Screenplay	The Fortune Cookie

Awards
Preceded by: Leo McCarey for Going My Way	Academy Award for Best Director 1945 for The Lost Weekend	Succeeded by: William Wyler for The Best Years of Our Lives
Preceded by: William Wyler for Ben-Hur	Academy Award for Best Director 1960 for The Apartment	Succeeded by: Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins for West Side Story

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

• Clinton, Paul. Legendary director Billy Wilder dead at 95. CNN. Retrieved January 20, 2006.

See also

• Billy Wilder filmography
• List of film collaborations
• David Niven
• Ruth Chatterton
• Laurence Olivier

Literature

• Richard Armstrong, Billy Wilder, American Film Realist (McFarland & Company, Inc.: 2000)
• Chandler, Charlotte, Nobody's Perfect. Billy Wilder. A Personal Biography (New York: Schuster & Schuster, 2002)
• Crowe, Cameron, Conversations with Wilder (New York: Knopf, 2001)
• Hermsdorf, Daniel, Billy Wilder. Filme - Motive - Kontroverses (Bochum: Paragon-Verlag, 2006)
• Hopp, Glenn, Billy Wilder (Pocket Essentials: 2001)
• Hopp, Glenn / Duncan, Paul, Billy Wilder (Köln / New York: Taschen, 2003)
• Horton, Robert, Billy Wilder Interviews (University Press of Mississippi, 2001)
• Jacobs, Jérôme, Billy Wilder (Paris: Rivages Cinéma, 2006)
• Lally, Kevin, Wilder Times: The Life of Billy Wilder (Henry Holt & Co: 1st ed edition, May 1996)
• Sikov, Ed, On Sunset Boulevard. The Life and Times of Billy Wilder (New York: Hyperion, 1999)
• Wood, Tom, The Bright Side of Billy Wilder, Primarily (New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc, 1969)
• Zolotow, Maurice, Billy Wilder in Hollywood (Pompton Plains: Limelight Editions, 2004)
• Hellmuth Karasek, Billy Wilder, eine Nahaufnahme (Heyne, 2002)

External links

• Billy Wilder at the Internet Movie Database
• Billy Wilder at the TCM Movie Database
• Billy Wilder at SensesOfCinema.com
• Billy Wilder - The German-Hollywood Connection
• Film Noir and Billy Wilder
• American Master - Billy Wilder
• Wilder Bibliography (via UC Berkeley)
• Billy Wilder Fanlisting
• Billy Wilder Tribute at NPR

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