58 Fun Facts About Billy Wilder

Billy Wilder was born in 1906 in Sucha, a small town in Galicia that was then part of which empire?

Austria-Hungary broke up when Wilder was twelve, by which time his family had moved to Vienna; his birthplace is now in Poland.

Billy Wilder, born Samuel, was nicknamed Billie by his mother after which legend of the American frontier?

Buffalo Bill Cody fascinated his mother, who had lived in the United States in her youth, so the boy registered as Samuel was Billie at home in Europe long before he saw America.

Which fictional detective did Billy Wilder give a 'private life' in a 1970 film?

Sherlock Holmes: Wilder planned The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes as a long roadshow epic of several cases, but the studio cut whole episodes before release, to his dismay.

Which crooner starred in Billy Wilder's 1948 musical The Emperor Waltz?

Bing Crosby played an American salesman hawking gramophones to an emperor; Wilder made the frothy musical straight after his army service in the ruins of occupied Berlin.

Billy Wilder turned his weeks as a hired dance partner in a 1920s Berlin hotel into what?

A newspaper serial: Wilder was a freelance reporter at the time, and he wrote up his stint as a hotel dancer for hire in a Berlin daily under the title 'Waiter, a Dancer, Please!'

Which two future Hollywood directors made the 1930 Berlin film People on Sunday with Wilder?

Fred Zinnemann and Robert Siodmak. Siodmak co-directed and Zinnemann assisted on camera; decades later Siodmak claimed Wilder had barely worked on it, while Wilder said they had all directed it.

After fleeing Hitler's Germany in 1933, Wilder made his directorial debut in which city?

Paris. By his own account he was on the train there the day after the Reichstag fire; he co-directed Mauvaise Graine, a shoestring film about young car thieves, before leaving for Hollywood.

Wilder co-wrote Ninotchka, the 1939 Greta Garbo comedy sold with which tagline?

Garbo Laughs! It played on 'Garbo Talks!', the slogan for her first talkie; her stern Soviet envoy sits stone-faced through a count's jokes, then roars when he slips off his chair.

Who was Wilder's screenwriting partner on films from Ninotchka to Sunset Boulevard?

Charles Brackett. In time Wilder directed and Brackett produced the scripts they wrote together; the often warring pair turned out a run of hits before they parted in 1950.

Wilder's Hollywood directorial debut in 1942 was which comedy starring Ginger Rogers?

The Major and the Minor. Rogers's character poses as a 12-year-old to ride the train at half fare, and an army major, taken in by the act, shelters the 'child' in his compartment.

With which other crime novelist did Wilder adapt James M. Cain's Double Indemnity?

Raymond Chandler. New to studio work, he offered to hand in a script in little more than a week; the job took months, and at one point he resigned with a letter of complaints about Wilder.

Double Indemnity opens with the wounded Walter Neff confessing into what device?

A dictaphone. He dictates it as an office memo to claims manager Barton Keyes, who had worked out that the death was murder but never suspected his own friend.

Cain's Double Indemnity drew on which 1927 case of a wife and lover killing her husband?

The Ruth Snyder murder. She went to the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1928, where a news photographer with a camera strapped to his ankle secretly snapped her for the front page.

In Double Indemnity, the policy pays double if Phyllis's husband seems to die in which unlikely way?

A fall from a train. Walter strangles him in the car, boards on crutches posing as him, then jumps off so the body can be laid on the tracks.

Wilder cast which star of light comedies against type as the murderous Walter Neff in Double Indemnity?

Fred MacMurray. Used to romantic and comic leads, he resisted the part until Wilder talked him round, then let Wilder cast him as a cad again in The Apartment.

Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945) was a stark portrait of one man's battle with what?

Alcoholism. A liquor-industry trade group campaigned against the film before its release, fearing prohibitionists would seize on it; it went on to win Best Picture.

Who won the Best Actor Oscar as the struggling writer Don Birnam in The Lost Weekend?

Ray Milland. For his long walk up Third Avenue, Wilder hid the camera in a bakery truck and filmed him among real New Yorkers who had no idea a film was being shot.

Like The Lost Weekend, which of these won both Best Picture and the top prize at Cannes?

Parasite. Its 2019 Palme d'Or was an outright win, whereas The Lost Weekend took the top prize of the very first Cannes festival in an eleven-way tie.

Wilder directed Death Mills, a 1945 documentary about Nazi atrocities, for which audience?

His own mother, stepfather and grandmother were murdered in the Holocaust.

Sunset Boulevard opens with the narrator's body floating where?

In a swimming pool. Wilder first opened the film in a morgue, where the dead writer told his story to the other corpses, but preview audiences laughed and the scene was cut.

Which silent-film star played the deluded Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard?

Gloria Swanson. The silent film Norma screens at home is Queen Kelly, a real unfinished Swanson picture whose director, Erich von Stroheim, plays her butler.

Which actor was signed to play Sunset Boulevard's Joe Gillis but withdrew just before filming, giving William Holden the part?

Montgomery Clift. Wilder later said he had written the part for him; Clift's exit shortly before shooting handed Holden a role that brought a Best Actor nomination.

Norma Desmond's bridge partners, whom Joe calls "the waxworks", included which silent comedian playing himself?

Buster Keaton. Wilder filled Norma's card table with real stars the talkies had left behind: Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson and H. B. Warner all appear as themselves.

Which director plays himself in Sunset Boulevard, visited by Norma during a shoot?

Cecil B. DeMille. The set was his real Samson and Delilah, in production just before Wilder's film, and three decades earlier he had made the actress playing Norma a star.

Norma Desmond has written a script for her comeback about which biblical figure?

Salome. Norma means to play the young princess herself, and in the final scene she sweeps down her staircase believing the newsreel cameras are filming it.

A sign on Wilder's office wall asked how which director, his idol, would do it?

Ernst Lubitsch. Wilder had written Ninotchka for the master of sly romantic comedy, and whenever he got stuck in the middle of a scene he asked himself the question on the wall.

Sunset Boulevard won three of its eleven Oscar nominations but lost Best Picture to which film?

All About Eve. Both films turned on an ageing actress, and both leading ladies lost Best Actress to Judy Holliday, the star of Born Yesterday.

William Holden won his Best Actor Oscar as a cynical wheeler-dealer in which Wilder film?

Stalag 17. Holden reportedly asked for his character to be made more likeable; Wilder refused, and the unsoftened part won the Oscar.

Which fellow director plays the sadistic camp commandant in Wilder's 1953 prisoner-of-war film?

Otto Preminger. Himself a Jewish emigre from Vienna, he had made Nazis his acting speciality ever since casting himself as one on Broadway.

In Sabrina, Audrey Hepburn plays the daughter of a wealthy family's what?

Chauffeur. She grows up on the estate pining for the family's playboy son, who never notices her, then comes home from cooking school abroad so changed that both brothers fall for her.

Sabrina (1954) was Wilder's last film for which studio, where Norma Desmond makes her return visit in Sunset Boulevard?

Paramount. By his own account it first let him direct expecting him to fail and stop pestering its regular directors; instead he directed there for a dozen years.

The Seven Year Itch contains the famous image of Marilyn Monroe's white dress blown up by what?

A passing subway train. Her husband Joe DiMaggio watched the street shoot among the onlookers and press and was disgusted by it; the couple announced their divorce soon afterwards.

Wilder released three films in 1957, including a biopic starring James Stewart as which aviator?

Charles Lindbergh. Stewart, a real wartime bomber pilot, bleached his hair blond to play the 25-year-old flier of The Spirit of St. Louis, though he was by then in his late forties.

Witness for the Prosecution, with Charles Laughton and Marlene Dietrich, was based on a play by which author?

Agatha Christie. As the credits roll a voice asks the audience not to give away the ending, and at previews filmgoers were handed cards to sign swearing they would keep it secret.

Love in the Afternoon (1957) was Wilder's first script with which writer, who became his regular partner?

I. A. L. Diamond. Born in Romania, he began signing himself with the initials as a student journalist at Columbia, and went on to co-write every film Wilder directed from Some Like It Hot onward.

Which body judged Some Like It Hot 'seriously offensive' to traditional standards of morality when it opened in 1959?

The Catholic Legion of Decency. Its reviewer read 'outright smut' into the dialogue, yet the film went on to top the American Film Institute's list of the funniest American comedies.

Which historic beachfront California resort stood in for Florida's Seminole Ritz in Some Like It Hot?

Hotel del Coronado. Wilder chose the Victorian resort near San Diego because it still looked like the 1920s, the decade of the film's story.

Before settling on Jack Lemmon for Some Like It Hot, Wilder considered which singer for the part?

Frank Sinatra. He is said to have missed a meeting with Wilder, and the part of Jerry the bass player went to Lemmon, who earned a Best Actor nomination for it.

Wilder shot Some Like It Hot in black and white after colour tests made what look ghoulish?

The drag make-up. Monroe had wanted colour, and gave way only after seeing a colour test of her two co-stars in their wigs and make-up.

Who delivers the famous last line of Some Like It Hot, as the smitten millionaire Osgood Fielding III?

Joe E. Brown. Wilder and his co-writer put the line in a week before the scene was shot, as a stand-in until they thought of something better; it drew one of the biggest laughs he ever heard.

What does Wilder's tombstone say?

I'm a writer but then nobody's perfect. The stone borrows the closing joke of Some Like It Hot and turns it on the man who filmed it.

In The Apartment, C. C. Baxter is a lowly clerk in what kind of business, lending his flat to its executives?

An insurance firm. Baxter is one clerk in a vast hall of identical desks at Consolidated Life, and lending out his key is his way of climbing to an office of his own.

In The Apartment, Jack Lemmon's bachelor Baxter strains spaghetti through what?

A tennis racket. Baxter is cooking for Fran, the lift operator he has nursed through an overdose in his flat, and the makeshift strainer is his idea of a proper dinner.

Who was originally cast as Sheldrake in The Apartment before dying unexpectedly?

Paul Douglas. He died of a heart attack weeks after his casting was announced, and the philandering boss went instead to a star of genial comedies, cast against type.

The Apartment was turned into which 1968 Broadway musical by Burt Bacharach, Hal David and Neil Simon?

Promises, Promises. Jerry Orbach starred as the clerk with the borrowed flat, and one of its songs, 'I'll Never Fall in Love Again', became a hit that won Dionne Warwick a Grammy.

Which Wilder film first paired Jack Lemmon with Walter Matthau?

The Fortune Cookie. Matthau had a heart attack partway through, stopping the shoot for weeks, and still won an Oscar as the ambulance-chasing lawyer 'Whiplash Willie'.

Which Cold War farce starring James Cagney did Wilder direct in 1961?

One, Two, Three. Wilder was shooting in Berlin on the morning the Wall went up in August 1961, and the crew had to move to Munich to finish the film.

Wilder's Irma la Douce was based on a French stage musical, but what did he do with its songs?

Cut them entirely. The stage tunes survive only as background themes, yet André Previn's arrangement of them won the film its one Oscar, for best adapted score.

Which novel did Wilder try to buy, hoping to film it as a memorial to his family murdered in the Holocaust?

Schindler's Ark. Steven Spielberg made it instead; Wilder praised the film and wrote in a German newspaper asking those who doubted the Holocaust: 'then please tell me, where is my mother?'

Which Spanish director used his Oscar speech for Belle Époque to thank Billy Wilder?

Fernando Trueba. He said he would like to believe in God in order to thank him, but believed only in Billy Wilder, so he thanked Mr. Wilder instead.

Which Noël Coward work, with lovers meeting in a friend's flat, inspired The Apartment?

Brief Encounter. Wilder had jotted the idea down years earlier: what about the friend who has to crawl back into the warm bed the lovers have just left?

Who stars as the disgraced, cynical reporter Chuck Tatum in Ace in the Hole?

Kirk Douglas. His reporter keeps a trapped man underground for days longer than the rescue need take, to keep the story on the front page; audiences stayed away, and it was Wilder's first flop.

Ace in the Hole echoed the 1925 case of Floyd Collins, trapped in a cave in which state?

Kentucky. Collins was searching for a new cave entrance near Mammoth Cave; a slightly built Louisville reporter squeezed in to feed and interview him and won a Pulitzer, but Collins died before rescuers got through.

What did Wilder sell off at auction in 1989?

His art collection. It fetched more than $30 million in New York; he had collected modern art since the start of his career and said he was selling partly to free up wall space.

Which Academy honour did Wilder receive late in his career?

The Irving G. Thalberg Award. Wilder called such late tributes his 'Quick, before they croak' awards, and spent his speech telling how he had talked his way into America in 1934.

Which writer-director broke Wilder's record of twelve screenwriting Oscar nominations?

Woody Allen. Deconstructing Harry brought his thirteenth writing nomination; Wilder, never sure of his English, had written every one of his Hollywood scripts with a collaborator.

Which 1981 comedy was Wilder's final film as director?

Buddy Buddy. After it flopped no studio would back another Wilder picture, yet for years he went on writing every day, still hoping to make one more.

In his first hard-up years in Hollywood, Wilder shared a room with which fellow émigré actor?

Peter Lorre. Wilder then spoke so little English that his first Hollywood scripts had to be written with partners who could translate for him, and for a time he was out of a job altogether.