Billy Wilder was born 116 years ago today.
Wilder was an Austrian-born American filmmaker, screenwriter, producer, artist and journalist — whose career spanned more than 50 years through 60 films. He is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Hollywood's golden age.
Wilder is one of only five people to have won Academy Awards as producer, director and screenwriter for the same film (The Apartment), and was the first person to accomplish this. He became a screenwriter in the late 1920s while living in Berlin.
After the rise of the Nazi Party, Wilder, who was Jewish, left for Paris, where he made his directorial debut. He moved to Hollywood in 1933. In 1939, he had a hit when he co-wrote the screenplay for the screwball comedy, Ninotchka.
Wilder established his directorial reputation with Double Indemnity (1944), a film noir he co-wrote with Raymond Chandler, the mystery novelist. He earned the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for the adaptation of a Charles R. Jackson story, The Lost Weekend (1945), about alcoholism.
In 1950, Wilder co-wrote and directed the critically acclaimed Sunset Blvd. From the mid-1950s on, Wilder made mostly comedies. Among the classics Wilder created 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 comedy, Sabrina (1954).
He directed fourteen different actors in Oscar-nominated performances. Wilder was recognized with the American Film Institute (AFI) Life Achievement Award in 1986. In 1988, Wilder was awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. In 1993, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts.
Wilder died in 2002 at the age of 95.
Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell being directed by Billy Wilder in the Seven Year Itch, 1955