59 Fun Facts About William Wyler

As of 2025, which director alone has won more Best Director Oscars than William Wyler's three?

John Ford won four, for The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley and The Quiet Man, yet never for one of the westerns he is famous for.

At which Roman landmark did Gregory Peck fool his co-star by hiding his hand in William Wyler's Roman Holiday?

The Mouth of Truth. Legend says the stone face bites off a liar's hand; Peck sprang the trick without warning his co-star, so her shriek was real and Wyler kept it in the film.

Which contested border region holds Mulhouse, William Wyler's birthplace?

Alsace. Germany had annexed the region in 1871 and France regained it after World War I, so the German-born Wyler's hometown is a French city today.

Wyler's mother was a cousin of which studio founder, who gave him his start?

Carl Laemmle brought him to New York, then docked five dollars a week from his $25 pay until the cost of the Atlantic crossing was repaid.

Which studio gave William Wyler his first directing jobs, on dozens of silent westerns in the 1920s?

Universal. He started there as an office boy and prop boy, worked up to assistant director, and between 1925 and 1928 directed more than two dozen silent westerns.

William Wyler's first all-talking film, Hell's Heroes, told a story later filmed again as 3 Godfathers with which star?

John Wayne. Peter B. Kyne's tale of outlaws who promise a dying mother to save her baby was filmed several times; Wyler shot his 1929 version on location in the desert.

Which actor played gambler Nick Arnstein in William Wyler's 1968 musical Funny Girl?

Omar Sharif. Shooting began within months of the Six-Day War, and the Egyptian star's love scenes with a Jewish co-star caused an uproar back home.

William Wyler's first Best Director nomination came for which 1936 film about a retired car maker?

Dodsworth. Its producer refused to fire co-star Mary Astor when her custody battle became a tabloid scandal during the shoot, and the film went on to seven Oscar nominations.

Which novelist wrote the story of a retired car maker touring Europe that William Wyler filmed in 1936?

Sinclair Lewis. He had turned down a Pulitzer Prize in 1926, but in 1930, a year after this novel appeared, he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Which cinematographer, famous for Citizen Kane, worked with Wyler on Wuthering Heights, The Little Foxes and The Best Years of Our Lives?

Gregg Toland won his only Oscar for Wuthering Heights, yet when The Best Years of Our Lives swept the Academy Awards he wasn't even nominated.

Which camera technique, also a hallmark of Citizen Kane, did William Wyler use to stage scenes in long, uncut takes?

Deep focus keeps foreground and background sharp at once, so Wyler could play out a whole scene, with its shifts of light and movement, in a single shot instead of cutting between close-ups.

Bette Davis won her second Oscar for which 1938 Wyler film?

Jezebel. Warner Bros. made it to cash in on the publicity building for Gone with the Wind, and Davis later said Wyler's direction on it made her a far, far better actress.

Which actor played the banker fiancé who jilts Bette Davis in William Wyler's 1938 drama of old New Orleans?

Henry Fonda. His character breaks off the engagement after she defies New Orleans custom by wearing a red dress to a ball where unmarried women wear white.

Which actor received his first Oscar nomination for Wyler's Wuthering Heights and credited him with teaching him to act for the screen?

Laurence Olivier. He arrived dismissing film as an 'anemic little medium' and said Wyler's savage criticism nearly killed him, but five years later he was directing his own Henry V.

Vivien Leigh wanted Cathy in Wyler's Wuthering Heights, but who played her?

Merle Oberon. The film was planned as her vehicle, so Leigh was offered only a supporting part and refused; on set, Oberon and her Heathcliff could barely stand each other.

Which director, whose actor father starred in William Wyler's A House Divided, called Wyler his best friend in the industry?

John Huston. He was writing dialogue at the studio when Wyler directed his father in 1931, and Wyler gave him his first inside view of how a film gets made.

Mrs. Miniver, Wyler's first Best Director winner, starred Walter Pidgeon and which actress, who won Best Actress?

Greer Garson. Her acceptance speech reputedly ran about five and a half minutes, and a few months later she married Richard Ney, the actor who played her son in the film.

Which wartime leader is said to have likened Mrs. Miniver to a fleet of battleships?

Winston Churchill. The wording varies, a flotilla in one telling and a hundred battleships in another; the film's closing sermon was also printed on leaflets and dropped over occupied Europe.

Which US ambassador to Britain urged studios to stop making pro-British films because he believed British defeat was imminent?

Joseph Kennedy. He gave Hollywood producers the warning in 1940, but Mrs. Miniver went ahead anyway and became the biggest box-office hit of 1942.

Wyler's 1944 wartime documentary followed the crew of which type of aircraft?

A Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress. Wyler shot The Memphis Belle on real raids over Europe, flying five combat missions himself, and once passed out in the air from lack of oxygen.

What lasting injury did Wyler suffer while making the documentary Thunderbolt!?

He went deaf in one ear after a flight over Italy filming from a bomber, and he drew on coming home a disabled veteran when he made The Best Years of Our Lives.

Which producer commissioned the story behind Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives?

Samuel Goldwyn. He hired MacKinlay Kantor, who handed in a story written in blank verse; Goldwyn disliked it, and Robert E. Sherwood reworked it into the Oscar-winning script.

Non-actor Harold Russell, who played Homer in The Best Years of Our Lives, had lost what during his wartime Army service?

Both hands. He lost them in a 1944 training accident with explosives, was given two Oscars for the one performance, and in 1992 sold one of them at auction.

Who won Best Actor for The Best Years of Our Lives?

Fredric March won his second Best Actor Oscar as Al Stephenson, the returning sergeant who goes back to his bank and is rebuked for approving a fellow veteran's loan with no collateral.

William Wyler's 1949 film The Heiress was based on which Henry James novel?

Washington Square. It reached the screen by way of a hit Broadway play, and the film ends with the jilted heiress bolting the door while her returning suitor pounds on it.

Which actress won Best Actress for her first starring role in Wyler's Roman Holiday?

Audrey Hepburn. Halfway through filming, Gregory Peck told Wyler the newcomer should share top billing with him, sure that she was about to become a star.

Which blacklisted screenwriter wrote Roman Holiday's story but received no screen credit for it until decades later?

Dalton Trumbo. Ian McLellan Hunter fronted for him and was handed the Oscar for the story; the writers' guild restored Trumbo's full credit only in 2011, 35 years after his death.

Which William Wyler film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1957?

Friendly Persuasion. Gary Cooper heads a pacifist family tested by the Civil War, and the film went out with no writing credit because its screenwriter, Michael Wilson, was blacklisted.

William Wyler filmed Ben-Hur's chariot race in a vast arena built at which European film studio?

Cinecittà. Hollywood studios flocked to Rome in the 1950s partly to spend earnings they could not take out of Italy, which is how the Ben-Hur arena came to be built there.

Which rodeo champion turned stunt pioneer staged Ben-Hur's chariot race alongside Andrew Marton?

Yakima Canutt. At least a hundred horses were reported to have died making the 1925 version's race, and in the one he staged none was hurt.

Which actor wanted the title role in William Wyler's Ben-Hur, refused the villain's part, and made a rival Roman epic instead?

Kirk Douglas. Wyler had already cast his lead and offered him Messala; Douglas said no, and the next year he produced and starred in Spartacus.

Which struggling studio staked its future on William Wyler's Ben-Hur, then the costliest film ever made?

MGM. The gamble paid off: Ben-Hur was the biggest box-office hit of 1959 and took in several times what it had cost.

Which composer wrote the score for William Wyler's Ben-Hur, one of the longest ever composed for a film?

Miklós Rózsa won his third Oscar for it, and just before the chariot race he slipped in music he had first written for an earlier Roman epic, Quo Vadis.

Which TV western star did William Wyler cast in The Children's Hour soon after he won a lawsuit to leave Warner Bros.?

James Garner. Beating the studio behind Maverick in court left him briefly graylisted until Wyler's offer broke the freeze, and two years later he was starring in The Great Escape.

William Wyler's The Children's Hour was based on a 1934 play by which writer, also the author of The Little Foxes?

Lillian Hellman. Wyler had filmed her play once before, as These Three in 1936, when the censors made him turn its rumoured lesbian affair into a conventional love triangle.

Which English actors starred as kidnapper and captive in Wyler's 1965 film The Collector?

Terence Stamp and Samantha Eggar. He plays a butterfly collector who adds an art student to his collection, and both actors won the top acting prizes at Cannes in 1965.

Whose film debut did Wyler direct in Funny Girl (1968)?

Barbra Streisand. She had already made the part her own on Broadway, and her first film performance won the Best Actress Oscar in the category's first exact tie.

Funny Girl is loosely based on the life of which comedienne?

Fanny Brice. The film was produced by her own son-in-law, Ray Stark, who had first turned her story into the Broadway musical of the same name.

Which 1970 film was Wyler hired to direct but quit before production began?

Patton. Wyler left before filming began, and his replacement, Franklin J. Schaffner, went on to win the Best Director Oscar for it.

Which actor won his third supporting Oscar in five years as Judge Roy Bean in William Wyler's The Westerner?

Walter Brennan. His Judge Roy Bean hangs men on a whim yet worships the actress Lillie Langtry, and as of 2025 no other actor has won three supporting Oscars.

Which actor won an Oscar as Wyler's Ben-Hur?

Charlton Heston. He compared acting for Wyler to getting the works in a Turkish bath: you nearly drown, but you come out smelling like a rose.

Which Somerset Maugham adaptation, with Bette Davis as a planter's wife on trial for murder, did William Wyler direct in 1940?

The Letter. Her character claims self-defence until a note in her own handwriting surfaces, and the film brought Wyler the second of four straight Best Director nominations.

Which director equalled Wyler's record of thirteen Best Picture nominees in 2023?

Steven Spielberg got there with The Fabelmans, based on his own childhood; three of Wyler's thirteen went on to win Best Picture, against one of Spielberg's, Schindler's List.

Which Academy honour did William Wyler receive in 1966?

The Thalberg Award honours a producer's body of work, and Wyler qualified because he had produced many of his own films, among them The Heiress and Roman Holiday.

William Wyler was briefly married in the mid-1930s to which actress, the star of his comedy The Good Fairy?

Margaret Sullavan. The two clashed so often on set that she walked off several times, yet they married before filming ended and were divorced within two years.

Which stage troupe reached the screen in William Wyler's 1937 film of Sidney Kingsley's New York slum drama?

The Dead End Kids. Six of the boys were brought from the Broadway cast to Hollywood, and they proved so popular that they kept making films for years as the East Side Kids and the Bowery Boys.

Wyler's 1952 film Carrie, with Jennifer Jones, was based on a novel by whom?

Theodore Dreiser. His novel was Sister Carrie; the studio, nervous about its unflattering view of American life in the McCarthy era, cut the film to brighten its tone and removed a suicide scene.

Which Humphrey Bogart film noir did Wyler direct in 1955?

The Desperate Hours. Bogart leads three escaped convicts who take a suburban family hostage in their own home, a story Joseph Hayes had already told as a novel and a Broadway play.

Wyler's 1966 heist comedy How to Steal a Million paired the leading lady of his Roman Holiday with which actor?

Peter O'Toole plays a burglar she hires to steal her father's forged statue from a Paris museum before experts can test it; he turns out to be a detective on the trail of forgeries.

William Wyler's western The Big Country starred Gregory Peck alongside which folk singer, who won a supporting Oscar for it?

Burl Ives. The gentle voice of A Holly Jolly Christmas won his Oscar as Rufus Hannassey, the snarling head of a ranching clan locked in a feud over water.

Which member of an acting dynasty starred as a driven New York lawyer in William Wyler's Counsellor at Law?

John Barrymore. He kept forgetting his lines, and one short scene took dozens of takes, yet his driven lawyer is counted among his best screen performances.

Which 1960s blockbuster was William Wyler set to direct, even scouting its locations, before he pulled out?

The Sound of Music. Wyler said he hated the stage show, was talked into the job and scouted Salzburg, then withdrew; Robert Wise took over and won the Best Director Oscar.

Which actor played Morris Townsend, the suitor suspected of fortune hunting, in William Wyler's The Heiress?

Montgomery Clift. The writers were asked to make his fortune hunter less of a villain than in the stage play, so the studio could trade on its new romantic star.

William Wyler went to war as an Air Forces major and came home at which rank?

Lieutenant colonel. He was overseas with the Air Forces when Mrs. Miniver won him his first directing Oscar, so his wife went up to accept it for him.

Which 2017 Netflix series features Steven Spielberg describing Wyler's filming of Memphis Belle?

Wyler flew real bombing missions over enemy territory in 1943 and once blacked out from lack of oxygen.

William Wyler's first wartime job was researching The Negro Soldier for an Army film unit headed by which Hollywood director?

Frank Capra. Wyler toured Alabama to research the film, but a transfer to the Army Air Forces took him to England before shooting, and Stuart Heisler directed it instead.

Which actress got Wyler to have Paramount buy the play that became The Heiress?

Olivia de Havilland saw the play on Broadway, urged Wyler to come and watch it, and went on to win her second Best Actress Oscar as its shy, deceived heroine.

Wyler's wife Margaret Tallichet once screen-tested for which famous role?

Scarlett O'Hara. Carole Lombard befriended her when she worked in Paramount's publicity office, and David O. Selznick put her under contract; she married Wyler in 1938 and soon gave up acting.

Where is William Wyler buried?

Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, Glendale. Wyler died of a heart attack in July 1981, just back from a London retrospective of his films and days after his daughter filmed a long interview with him.