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Billy Wilder (June 22, 1906 – March 27, 2002) was a 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 Billy by his mother. After dropping out of the University of Vienna to become a journalist, he moved to Berlin, Germany.Berlin
While in Berlin, and before his writing career became more successful, Wilder also allegedly worked as a taxi dancer. After writing crime and sports stories as a stringer for local newspapers, he was eventually offered a regular writing job at a Berlin tabloid. After gaining an interest in films, Wilder started working as a screenwriter. He worked with several other tyros (Fred Zinnemann and Robert Siodmak also worked with him on the 1929 feature People on Sunday). Wilder, who was Jewish, left for Paris and then the United States after the rise of Adolf Hitler. Wilder's mother, grandmother, and stepfather all died at the Auschwitz extermination camp.Hollywood
After arriving in Hollywood in 1933, Wilder shared an apartment with fellow emigre Peter Lorre, and continued his career as a screenwriter.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 directorial feature debut, The Major and the Minor, as well as Hold Back the Dawn and Ball of Fire.
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. 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. Wilder sometimes cast against type for major parts such as Fred MacMurray in The Apartment. MacMurray was famous as a wholesome family man from the television series My Three Sons, yet played a womanizing villain in Wilder's film. Wilder mentored Jack Lemmon and was the first director to pair him with Walter Matthau. Wilder had great respect for Lemmon calling him the hardest working actor he had ever met. Wilder filmed in black and white whenever studios would let him. Despite this conservative directoral style, his subject matter often pushed the boundaries of mainstream entertainment.
Wilder established his directorial reputation after helming Double Indemnity (1944), an early film noir he cowrote 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, echoing Wilder's experience as a gigolo in Berlin. 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 1950s extending to the 1960's, 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. After the lesser films Irma la Douce and Kiss Me, Stupid, Wilder garnered his last Oscar nomination for his screenplay The Fortune Cookie.
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 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. Film schools might not study Wilder's work in the comprehensive manner they approach other major directors such as Orson Welles or Alfred Hitchcock, because his varied work is not as conducive to examination by the auteur theory. Nevertheless, the fact remains that he has made some of cinematic history's most enduring classics in the farthest possible range of genres. He is responsible for two of the film noir era's most definitive films in Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, has made one of the best-rememebered romantic movies of the '50s with Sabrina and he has written and/or directed some of the greatest comedies ever made. Along with Woody Allen, he leads the list of films on the American Film Institute's list of 100 funniest 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 Ninochtka which he has writing credits for.In addition, The American Film Institute has ranked four of Wilder's pictures among the top 100 American films of the twentieth century. These are:
- Sunset Boulevard number 12
- Some Like It Hot number 14
- Double Indemnity number 38
- The Apartment number 93
Trivia
- Wilder is often 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.
- 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 Tutu."
- Spanish filmmaker Fernando Trueba said in his acceptance speech for the 1993 Best Non-English Speaking Film Oscar "I'd like to thank God, but I don't believe in God, 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".
Academy Awards
Note
Reference
See also
Literature
- 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 / Duncan, Paul, Billy Wilder (Köln / New York: Taschen, 2003)
- Jacobs, Jérôme, Billy Wilder (Paris: Rivages Cinéma, 2006)
- Sikov, Ed, On Sunset Boulevard. The Life and Times of Billy Wilder (New York: Hyperion, 1999)
- Zolotow, Maurice, Billy Wilder in Hollywood (Pompton Plains: Limelight Editions, 2004)
External links
- 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 - from NPR.org
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