Before Hollywood, Billy Wilder worked as a paid dance partner in Berlin
Billy Wilder was a Viennese reporter, then a taxi dancer in Berlin, then a Jewish refugee in Paris. By 1960 he had won Oscars for writing, directing and producing, finishing as one of Hollywood's most versatile filmmakers with seven Academy Awards from 21 nominations and a Palme d'Or.
He was born Samuel Wilder in 1906 in Sucha, a small Galician town he later joked was half an hour from Vienna by telegraph. His parents ran a cake shop at the railway station that grew into a chain of station cafes. His mother, who had seen Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in New York, nicknamed him Billie. Skipping university, he became a journalist in Vienna, and in 1926 the bandleader Paul Whiteman liked his interview so much he took him along to Berlin.
There Wilder wrote crime and sports stories for newspapers, then screenplays, contributing to 12 German films between 1929 and 1933. People on Sunday, made in 1930 with fellow newcomers Fred Zinnemann and Robert Siodmak, rejected the expressionism of Murnau and Lang for a plain, street-level realism that anticipated Italian neorealism and the French New Wave. When Hitler took power, Wilder left for Paris, calling it the sensible move for a Jew, and directed his first film there.
Reaching Hollywood in 1934, he waited out visa trouble in Mexico, an episode he later turned into Hold Back the Dawn, and became a citizen in 1939. His breakthrough was Ninotchka, written with Charles Brackett and Walter Reisch for Ernst Lubitsch, which sold Greta Garbo, famous for tragedy, with the slogan Garbo Laughs. Brackett, his partner until 1950, said that any idea he offered would be torn apart, then resurface days later as Wilder's own.
Double Indemnity, co-written with Raymond Chandler, earned his first directing nomination in 1944, and The Lost Weekend swept picture, director and screenplay. Sunset Boulevard brought another writing Oscar; he directed Marilyn Monroe twice, including Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment in 1960 again took picture, director and screenplay. Seven of his films sit in the National Film Registry, and honours followed from the AFI, the Kennedy Center and BAFTA. He died in 2002.
Source: Billy Wilder
