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| Hollywood mourns
loss of icon from golden era 6-time Oscar winner shaped careers as director By Edward Guthmann, Chronicle Staff Writer |
Friday, March 29, 2002
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Billy Wilder, the witty, puckish director of such Hollywood classics as "Some Like It Hot" and "Sunset Boulevard," died of pneumonia Wednesday night at his Beverly Hills home. He was 95. One of the last remaining greats of Hollywood's golden era, Wilder was a master director whose films, which also include "The Apartment," "Double Indemnity" and "Sabrina," are models of intelligence, humor and tight, economic storytelling. Although he directed his last film, "Buddy Buddy," in 1981, Wilder continued to go to his Beverly Hills office almost daily into his 90s -- answering mail and phone calls, reading the trade papers, maintaining his extensive art collection. In recent years, he suffered from poor eyesight and cancer. In April he was hospitalized with a urinary infection. Wilder was born in Austria in 1906, came to the United States in 1934 and quickly learned the moxie, energy and rhythms of American speech -- proving the maxim that foreigners are often the best observers of the country they adopt as their own. "There are few filmmakers who don't crave being compared to him," wrote director Cameron Crowe in his 1999 book "Conversations with Billy Wilder." "His is a tough-minded romanticism and elegance; the lack of sentimentality has left him forever relevant as an artist." One of the most honored of Hollywood directors, Wilder was nominated for 21 Oscars and won six, two for directing "The Lost Weekend" (1945) and "The Apartment" (1960), two for producing those films and one for writing "Sunset Boulevard." He directed the late Jack Lemmon in seven movies ("He Was My Everyman") gave signature roles to Gloria Swanson in "Sunset Boulevard," Marilyn Monroe in "Some Like It Hot" and Barbara Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity, " and directed three men to Oscars: Ray Milland ("The Lost Weekend"), William Holden ("Stalag 17") and Walter Matthau ("The Fortune Cookie").
INTERVIEWED FREUDOriginally a journalist -- he interviewed Sigmund Freud, who kicked him out of his home -- Wilder broke into filmmaking as a screenwriter in Berlin, fled Hitler in 1933 and directed his first film, "Mauvaise Graine" (Bad Seed), in Paris in 1934. "People said Hitler was a big, loud, unpleasant joke," Wilder once said. "But at the UFA building, the MGM of Berlin, the elevator boy was suddenly in a storm trooper's uniform. I had a new Graham-Paige American car and a new apartment furnished in Bauhaus, and I sold everything for a few hundred dollars. . . . I was on the train to Paris the day after the Reichstag fire," he said in an interview years ago.
LONG CAREER AS FILMMAKERAlthough he hadn't directed a film since "Buddy Buddy" in 1981 -- and chafed at a system that turned its back on aging directors -- Wilder logged one of the longest careers of any filmmaker in the first century of cinema. Best known as a writer and director of comedy, he was also adept at romance ("Sabrina"), film noir suspense ("Double Indemnity"), courtroom thriller ("Witness for the Prosecution") and social satire ("One, Two, Three"). Wilder had a shrewd, penetrating eye for human vanity and greed, and he converted that view into screenplays that often portrayed people as the helpless victims of their own worst impulses: the faded movie goddess-turned- murderess in "Sunset Boulevard," the bored wife who cons an insurance man into bumping off her husband in "Double Indemnity," the sad-sack accountant who offers his flat to philandering executives and their paramours in "The Apartment."
CO-WROTE SCRIPTSHe wrote most of his scripts with a collaborator, at first with Charles Brackett and later with I.A.L. Diamond, and said that he had turned to directing only because he grew tired of directors fouling up his scripts. At one point, filmmaker Mitchell Leisen hired a police officer to keep Wilder off the set of a film he had written. Underneath the wily, irascible exterior was a melancholic soul who lost his father at 22 and whose mother, stepfather and grandmother all died in the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz. Wilder overcame those tragedies with hard work, stoicism, a brilliant, trenchant wit and a happy, 52-year marriage to his second wife, Audrey. Late in his life, Wilder longed to make "Schindler's List" as a memorial to his mother, but found that Steven Spielberg already owned the rights to the story. "We spoke about it," Wilder said in Crowe's book. "He was a gentleman, of course, and we acknowledged each other's strong desires. In the end, he could not give it up."
TRIALS OF A DIRECTORDirecting, Wilder said, "is a very important job, because you commit yourself. . . . Unlike the director of a play, you cannot change it anymore, that's it. You choose the best of what you have, and it's in the picture. "If a young man (says) he would like to be a director, he sees only the glory of it. He does not see the trouble, the fights, the things he has to swallow. . . . You feel like a very small, small man." And yet, it was one measure of Wilder's genius that every attempt to reinterpret his work was disappointing. Sydney Pollack's 1995 remake of "Sabrina" was trounced by critics, and the Broadway musicals that were made from "Sunset Boulevard" and "Some Like It Hot" (renamed "Sugar" for the stage) were doomed to pale when stacked against their source. "His movies are a worldwide language of love, intelligence and sparkling wit," Crowe said of his mentor yesterday. "To any fan of film or any student of how a great life is lived, all roads lead to Billy Wilder." When Crowe asked Wilder whether he had advice for future filmmakers, he laughed and said, "I am not anchored there at some observatory, you know. I think that we're living in very, very important and interesting times. . . . But we're not even close to having an assured peace in this world. "I don't know. I'm just very curious. That's the one thing that keeps me alive, is curiosity." Wilder is survived by his wife, Audrey; his daughter, Victoria;
and one grandchild. BILLY WILDER FILMOGRAPHY. -- AS WRITER-- "People on Sunday," 1929 -- "Emil and the Detectives," 1931 -- "Adorable," 1933 -- "One Exciting Adventure," 1934 -- "Music in the Air," 1934 -- "Lottery Lover," 1935 -- "Champagne Waltz," 1937 -- "Bluebeard's Eighth Wife," 1938 -- "Midnight," 1939 -- "What a Life," 1939 -- "Ninotchka," 1939 -- "Rhythm of the River," 1940 -- "Arise My Love," 1940 -- "Hold Back the Dawn," 1941 -- "Ball of Fire," 1942 -- "A Song Is Born," 1948 -- "Casino Royale," 1967 . -- AS WRITER-DIRECTOR -- "The Major and the Minor," 1942 -- "Five Graves to Cairo," 1943 -- "Double Indemnity," 1944 -- "The Lost Weekend," 1945 -- "The Emperor Waltz," 1948 -- "A Foreign Affair," 1948 -- "Sunset Boulevard," 1950 -- "Ace in the Hole (also known as 'The Big Carnival')," 1951 -- "Stalag 17," 1953 -- "Sabrina," 1954 -- "The Seven Year Itch," 1955 -- "The Spirit of St. Louis," 1957 -- "Love in the Afternoon," 1957 -- "Witness for the Prosecution," 1958 -- "Some Like It Hot," 1959 -- "The Apartment," 1960 -- "One, Two, Three," 1961 -- "Irma la Douce," 1963 -- "Kiss Me, Stupid," 1964 -- "The Fortune Cookie," 1966 -- "The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes," 1970 -- "Avanti! "1972 -- "The Front Page," 1974 -- "Fedora," 1978 -- "Buddy Buddy," 1981 . Source: Associated Press E-mail Edward Guthmann at eguthmann@sfchronicle.com. |
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