BILLY WILDER: Billy Wilder, who died on March 27th aged 95, was one of the greatest directors, scriptwriters and producers in the history of the cinema.
He was born on June 22nd, 1906, in Sucha - then the Galician part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He was Jewish, the son of a former head waiter-cum-Krakow hotel owner. His mother loved all things American, and she called Samuel "Billy" after Buffalo Bill Cody, whose wild west show she had once seen in New York. She had lived there as a girl and longed to go back - alas, she would perish in Auschwitz.
At the start of the first World War, the Wilders moved to Vienna. In 1924, Billy Wilder entered Vienna's university to read law, a calling that wilted as he became a part-time journalist.
The young Billy Wilder was a terrific dancer, a womaniser and a wit. He moved to Berlin in 1926 as an aide to the American jazz orchestra leader, Paul Whiteman. There he was the intimate of jazz musicians, a friend to a little-known Marlene Dietrich, and a journalist who made his name with a series on being a gigolo. In 1929, he became scenarist (or title writer) on Menschen am Sonntag (People on Sunday).
He then wrote Der Teufelsreporter (1929), Der Mann, Der Seinen Morder Sucht (1931), Emil Und Die Detektive (1931) and Das Blaue Vom Himmel (1932).
Early in 1933, when Hitler was appointed chancellor, Billy Wilder moved to Paris, and a hotel that already housed Peter Lorre. Billy Wilder had a tough time but he got to direct for the first time - Mauvaise Graine (1933). He didn't enjoy directing and was content to be a writer. Late in 1933 he sold a script to Columbia and sailed to New York practising English all the way to Los Angeles. He did not direct his next film, The Major And The Minor, until 1942. But he mastered the language and idioms of Hollywood and wrote a few unremarkable films.
In 1936, he married Judith Coppiza Iribeand. And then, in 1938, he met novelist Charles Brackett and they began a writing partnership that took the business by storm - Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938), Midnight (1939), Ninotchka (1939), Arise My Love (1940), Hold Back The Dawn (1941), and Ball Of Fire (1941). The Ninotchka script got an Oscar nomination (it lost to Gone With The Wind), as did Ball Of Fire and Hold Back The Dawn.
Then Billy Wilder hit the jackpot with James M. Cain's 1936 novella, Double Indemnity. Brackett found the story disgusting so Billy Wilder went for it with another producer, Joe Sistrom, and they got Raymond Chandler to help write it. Double Indemnity was nominated for best picture, for direction and for screenplay and, though it intimidated audiences, in the business it established Billy Wilder's authority.
Reunited, Billy Wilder and Brackett took a big gamble in electing to film Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend, a portrait of alcoholism that starred Ray Milland as the charming fatalist trying to kick his habit. Previewed early in 1945, audiences flinched from the film's scary treatment of weakness and the delirium sequences and Paramount was afraid to release it.
Out of love with the business, Billy Wilder became a colonel in psychological warfare, spending time in Paris and German and beginning his art collection. That autumn Paramount decided it could swallow The Lost Weekend. It won Oscars for best picture, director, screenplay and actor and remains both a harrowing picture and a step forward in understanding of addictive behaviour.
In 1950, Billy Wilder and Brackett were back with a treatment of their own world that has become a byword: Sunset Boulevard, maybe the most exultant confession of Hollywood's own tendency to madness. Nominated for six major Oscars, Sunset Boulevard won only one for screenplay - too many people in Hollywood remained in shock.
Then Billy Wilder and Brackett parted. Alone Billy Wilder made Ace In The Hole (1951), about a ruthless journalist (Kirk Douglas) who manipulates a story to boost his own career. This is maybe his most misanthropic picture, and one of the least appreciated.
Billy Wilder seemed to heed the warning in its box-office failure and in the next films bleak situations are happily resolved; Stalag 17 (1953); Sabrina (1954); The Seven Year Itch (1955); The Spirit Of St Louis (1957); and Witness For The Prosecution (1957).
The writer I.A.L. "Iz" Diamond became his new partner and taking up an old German 1930s comedy, about two musicians who got work in a black band by putting on black faces, they came up with Some Like It Hot, not just a perfect, screwball comedy, but an almost unconscious mix of gender confusion and erotic fantasy.
The Apartment, the next year, won Oscars for best picture, best direction and screenplay. Irma la Douce (1963) had Shirley MacLaine as a sweet tart and Jack Lemmon as the gendarme in love with her.
The Private Life Of Sherlock Holmes (1970) is the most ambitious and deeply felt of his later films. There was also The Fortune Cookie (1966), his first pairing of Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau, Avanti! (1972), The Front Page (1974) and Fedora (1978), a forlorn attempt to recapture the Hollywood intrigue of Sunset Boulevard.
Then came the years of grumbling inactivity, the Billy Wilder who was bitter at not being employed while still happily married to his second wife, Audrey Young, a singer and actress, who survives him along with his daughter from his first marriage.
Billy Wilder: born 1906; died, March 2002