Billy Wilder (born Samuel Wilder; June 22, 1906 – March 27, 2002) was an Austrian and American film director and screenwriter. His career in Hollywood spanned five decades, and he is regarded as one of America's most versatile filmmakers. He received seven Academy Awards (among 21 nominations), a BAFTA Award and the Palme d'Or.
Wilder was born into a Polish-Jewish family in Sucha, Galicia, Austria-Hungary. In 1916, he moved to Vienna, where he worked as a journalist instead of attending university. Wilder's career as a screenwriter started in Berlin, where he relocated in his early adulthood. The rise of the Nazi Party and antisemitism in Germany saw him move to Paris. Wilder moved to Hollywood in 1934, and had a major hit when he, Charles Brackett and Walter Reisch wrote the screenplay for Ninotchka (1939). He established a reputation as a director and received his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director with Double Indemnity (1944), a film noir he cowrote with Raymond Chandler. Wilder won Academy Awards for Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Picture for The Lost Weekend (1945).
In the 1950s, Wilder directed and co-wrote a string of critically acclaimed films, including Sunset Boulevard (1950), for which he won his second Academy Award for Best Screenplay; Ace in the Hole (1951), Stalag 17 (1953) and Sabrina (1954). He directed and co-wrote three films in 1957: The Spirit of St. Louis, Love in the Afternoon and Witness for the Prosecution. Wilder directed Marilyn Monroe in two films, The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959). In 1960, he co-wrote, produced and directed The Apartment, which won him Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay, Best Director and Best Picture.
Wilder received the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1986, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1990, the National Medal of Arts in 1993 and the BAFTA Fellowship Award in 1995. He also received the Directors Guild of America's Lifetime Achievement Award, the Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement, and the Producers Guild of America's Lifetime Achievement Award. Seven of Wilder's films are preserved in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Some Like It Hot, The Seven Year Itch and The Apartment were included on AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs list. His career was chronicled in the American Masters documentary Billy Wilder: The Human Comedy.
Samuel Wilder was born on June 22, 1906, into a Polish-Jewish family in Sucha, known as Sucha Beskidzka since 1964, a small town in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Years later in Hollywood, he described it as being "half an hour from Vienna. By telegraph." His parents were Eugenia (née Dittler), from Zakopane, and Max Wilder, from Stanisławczyk. The couple met in Kraków, where Wilder spent his early years. His mother described him as a "rambunctious kid"; inspired by Buffalo Bill's Wild West shows, which she saw while living briefly in New York, she nicknamed him "Billie", which he changed to "Billy" upon moving to the United States.
Their parents had a successful cake shop in Sucha's train station that flourished into a chain of railroad cafes. Eugenia and Max Wilder did not persuade their son to join the family business. Max moved to Kraków to manage a hotel before moving to Vienna, dying when Billy was 22 years old. After the family moved to Vienna, Wilder became a journalist instead of attending the University of Vienna. In 1926, jazz band leader Paul Whiteman was on tour in Vienna, where he was interviewed by Wilder. Whiteman liked young Wilder enough that he took him with the band to Berlin, where Wilder was able to make more connections in entertainment. Before achieving success as a writer, he was a taxi dancer in Berlin.
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. From 1929 to 1933, he produced 12 German films. He collaborated with other novices (including Fred Zinnemann and Robert Siodmak) on the 1930 film People on Sunday. Eschewing the German Expressionist styles of F. W. Murnau and Fritz Lang, People on Sunday was considered as a groundbreaking example of the Neue Sachlichkeit or New Objectivity movement in German cinema. This genre of Strassenfilm ("street film") paved way for Italian neorealism and the French New Wave. He wrote the screenplays for the 1931 film adaptation of Erich Kästner's Emil and the Detectives, The Man in Search of His Murderer (1931), Her Grace Commands (1931) and A Blonde Dream (1932), all produced in the Babelsberg Studios in Potsdam near Berlin. In 1932, Wilder collaborated with the writer and journalist Felix Salten on the screenplay for "Scampolo". After Adolf Hitler's rise to power, Wilder went to Paris ("It seemed the wise thing for a Jew to do.") There, he made his directorial debut, Mauvaise Graine (1934).
After arriving in Hollywood in 1934, Wilder continued working as a screenwriter. He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939, having spent time in Mexico waiting for the government after his six-month card expired in 1934, an episode reflected in his Hold Back the Dawn (1941). Wilder's first significant success was Ninotchka, a collaboration with fellow Jewish emigre Ernst Lubitsch. The romantic comedy starred Greta Garbo (generally known as a tragic heroine in melodramas), and was popularly and critically acclaimed. With the tagline "Garbo Laughs!", it took Garbo's career in a new direction. The film marked Wilder's first Academy Award nomination, which he shared with co-writer Charles Brackett. Wilder co-wrote many of his films with Brackett from 1938 to 1950. Brackett described their collaboration process: "The thing to do was suggest an idea, have it torn apart and despised. In a few days, it would be apt to turn up, slightly changed, as Wilder's idea. Once I got adjusted to that way of working, our lives were simpler."
Wilder continued his screenwriting career with a series of box office hits, including the romantic drama Hold Back the Dawn and the screwball comedy Ball of Fire. Both films earned him nominations for the 1941 Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Story, respectively. Wilder made his Hollywood directorial debut in 1942 with The Major and the Minor, a comedy starring Ginger Rogers and Ray Milland.
Wilder's mother, stepfather, and grandmother were all victims of the Holocaust. For decades, they were assumed to have been killed at Auschwitz, but while researching Polish and Israeli archives, his Austrian biographer Andreas Hutter discovered in 2011 that they were each murdered in different locations: his mother, Eugenia "Gitla" Siedlisker, in 1943 at Plaszów; his stepfather, Bernard "Berl" Siedlisker, in 1942 at Belzec; and his grandmother, Balbina Baldinger, died in 1943 in the ghetto in Nowy Targ.
Wilder's third Hollywood film as director, the film noir Double Indemnity (1944), starring Fred MacMurray, Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson and co-written with Raymond Chandler, was a major hit. It was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Director, Screenplay, Actress and Picture. The film not only set conventions for the noir genre (such as "venetian blind" lighting and voice-over narration), but is a landmark in the battle against Hollywood censorship. Based on James M. Cain's novel, it featured two love triangles and a murder plotted for insurance money. While the book was popular with the reading public, it had been considered unfilmable under the Hays Code because adultery was central to the plot.
In 1945, the Psychological Warfare Department of the United States Department of War produced an American documentary film directed by Wilder. The film known as Death Mills, or Die Todesmühlen, was intended for German audiences to educate them about the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. For the German version, Die Todesmühlen, Hanuš Burger is credited as the writer and director, while Wilder supervised the editing. Wilder is credited with the English-language version.