WILDER, BILLY

born June 22, 1906, Sucha, Austria [now in Poland] original name Samuel Wilder Austrian-born American motion-picture scenarist, director, and producer known for films that humorously treat subjects of controversy and offer biting indictments of hypocrisy in American life. Wilder attended Viennese schools, including the University of Vienna (which he left after a year), and then was a reporter in Vienna and in Berlin. His first film scenario was a collaboration on the semidocumentary Menschen am Sonntag (1929; People on Sunday), of which he was also codirector. For the next four years he wrote scripts for German and French films, then went to Hollywood, via Paris and Mexico. The advent of Adolf Hitler in 1933 and Wilder's Jewish background made emigration necessary. He established his reputation as a director with Double Indemnity (1944), produced by Charles Brackett, with whom he had already written some screenplays. Wilder spent 1945 in Germany in charge of the U.S. Army's Psychological Warfare Division. Then, collaborating first with Brackett until 1950 and then with I.A.L. Diamond from 1957, he wrote the films that he directed and frequently produced, creating a series on subjects that had not been considered as acceptable screen material, including alcoholism (The Lost Weekend, 1945), prisoner-of-war camps (Stalag 17, 1953), and prostitution (Irma La Douce, 1963). A number of his films, such as Sunset Boulevard (1950) and The Apartment (1960), weighed the emptiness of modern life. Later films, such as Avanti! (1972), Fedora (1978), and Buddy Buddy (1981), explore this same theme. Some of Wilder's greatest films were comedies, including Sabrina (1954), The Seven Year Itch (1955), Love in the Afternoon (1957), Some Like It Hot (1959), and One, Two, Three (1961). In 1986 the American Film Institute awarded him the Life Achievement Award, and in the 1988 Academy Awards he was given the Irving G. Thalberg Award.