Wilder, Billy b.June 22, 1906; Sucha, Galicia,Austria- Hungary d. March 28, 2002; Los Angeles, California

Austrian American director, scriptwriter, and producer of Hollywood classics such as

Director Billy Wilder behind the camera directing Gloria Swanson on the set of Paramount’s Sunset Boulevard, Los Angeles, ca.

Sunset Boulevard (1950), Seven Year Itch (1955), Some Like It Hot (1959), and Irma la Douce (1963). Born Samuel Wilder, he grew up in Vienna from 1910 in a middle­class Jewish family. In 1927 he began working in Berlin as a scriptwriter for the most important film studio in Germany, the Universum Film Aktien Gesellschaft (UFA), for a dozen projects such as Menchen am Sonntag (Men on Sunday, di­rected by Robert Siodmak, 1929). Wilder also adapted for screen Erich Kastner’s novel for children, Emil und die Detektive (Emil and the Detectives, directed by Ger­hard Lamprecht, 1931).

In February 1933 Wilder left Germany for France. In Paris for almost a year, he codirected his first film, Mauvaise Graine (Bad Seed, 1934), with actress Danielle Darrieux. The same year, Wilder sold a new script to Joe May, a German-born pro­ducer who was then working in Holly­wood. In January 1934 Wilder emigrated to the United States to work for Columbia Studios as a ghostwriter and then as dialo- gist for some of Ernst Lubitsch’s films: Bluebeard’s Eighth Wife (1938) and Ninotchka (1938), starring Greta Garbo. Also, Wilder cowrote the script for Howard Hawks’s Ball of Fire (1941).

In the United States, Wilder began by directing a spy film set in North Africa (in the Casablanca vein), Five Graves in Cairo (1943), with actor Erich von Stroheim, who later reappeared in Wilder’s Sunset Boule­vard (1950). Other films directed by Wilder during that period are Hotel Imperial (1944), adapted from a novel by author Lajos Biro; followed by a film noir titled Double Indemnity (1944), from a novel by Raymond Chandler; and The Lost Weekend (1945), which was the first “serious” feature film about alcoholism made in Hollywood, that gave Wilder two Oscars and still re­mains a milestone on that touchy subject. During World War II, Wilder’s mother (she was widowed in 1927), his grandparents, and many other members of his family were murdered by the Nazis.

There are many Atlantic crossings in Wilder’s movies. Exactly thirty years after the actual event, the biographical film Spirit of St. Louis (1957) tells the famous story of pioneer Charles Lindbergh, who was the first pilot to fly across the Atlantic Ocean in 1927. Later, in the comedy titled One, Two, Three (1961), we see the story of a U.S. representative of Coca-Cola work­ing in Berlin, who is charged with chaper­oning the daughter of a millionaire on hol­iday in Germany.

Although he made a few legendary movies in the fifties, Wilder’s reputation as a director declined in the seventies. Holly­wood studios rejected his last projects be­cause they considered Wilder a figure from the past. In fact, one of the last films di­rected by Wilder, Fedora (1978), had to be financed and coproduced with West Ger­man and French partners.

In 1986 Billy Wilder received an Oscar for his life’s work, and in 1988, the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award, after some twenty-five films. He had won many Os­cars as a screenwriter, director, and pro­ducer, including three for his comedy The Apartment (1961).

Yves Laberge

See also Hollywood; Lindbergh, Charles

Augustus; Lubitsch, Ernst; Preminger, Otto

Ludwig; Stroheim, Erich von

References and Further Reading

Hopp, Glenn. Billy Wilder. Koln: Taschen, 2003.