(writer/director, born June 22, 1906, Vienna, Austria; died March 27,
2002)
For six decades Billy Wilder has created one movie masterpiece after
another--as a writer, director, producer, or sometimes as all three. Add
this extraordinary endurance record to the fact that he has not limited
himself to one genre of film but has applied his talents to romantic comedies,
film noir, suspense, farce, and courtroom dramas with equally splendid
results--and Wilder's oeuvre becomes not just another brilliant career
but the very history of American film.
Wilder began writing for films in Berlin during the late 1920s and arrived
in the United States in 1934 with little English in his vocabulary, yet
by 1939 he had co-written with Charles Brackett the screenplay to what
is arguably the finest comedy of the 30s, Ninotchka. Three years
later, he made his directorial debut with another memorable comedy,
The Major and the Minor
From then on he would create a series of delicate images never to be
forgotten by movie lovers around the world: Gloria Swanson as the legendary
Norma Desmond descending the staircase at the end of Sunset Boulevard;
Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon in high heels precariously running away from
killer gangsters in Some Like It Hot; a tarted up Shirley MacLaine
walking the streets of Paris with her poodle in Irma Las Douce,
and, perhaps most memorably of all, Marilyn Monroe surrounded by her billowing
white skirt as she cools off by standing on top of a New York subway grate
in The Seven Year Itch.
In addition to Charles Brackett, Wilder's other great script collaborator
was I.A.L. Diamond, who began working with him in 1957 with Love in
the Afternoon. Nominated some 20 times, WIlder has won six Academy
Awards: for directing and co-writing The Lost Weekend (1945); and
for directing, co-writing, and producing The Apartment (1960),
which took Best Picture honors.
