Billy Wilder Trivia
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58 free Billy Wilder trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Billy Wilder arrived in Hollywood in 1934 speaking little English and left it with six Oscars, seven films in the National Film Registry and, by Roger Ebert's count, three of the greatest closing lines in cinema. This quiz starts with the life: the cake shop in Galicia, the taxi-dancing in Berlin, the flight from the Nazis, the family lost in the Holocaust, the partnership with Charles Brackett and later I. A. L. Diamond, and the epitaph that reads "I'm a writer but then nobody's perfect". Then it goes film by film: Ninotchka and "Garbo Laughs!", the Hays Code battles over Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend, Norma Desmond and the waxworks in Sunset Boulevard, Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole, William Holden's Oscar for Stalag 17, Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina, the subway grate in The Seven Year Itch, Marlene Dietrich in Witness for the Prosecution, 47 takes of "It's me, Sugar" in Some Like It Hot, the tennis-racket spaghetti of The Apartment, and the late films with Lemmon and Matthau. Easy questions ask which film ends "nobody's perfect"; the expert tier asks about lawsuits, casting near-misses and Cannes. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on Wilder and on each film, and the supporting sentence is attached to each question. If you like this, try our quizzes on Marilyn Monroe, film noir and classic Hollywood.
30 of 58 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Billy Wilder was born in 1906 in Sucha, a small town in Galicia that was then part of which empire?
Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary broke up when Wilder was twelve, by which time his family had moved to Vienna; his birthplace is now in Poland.
Q 02Billy Wilder, born Samuel, was nicknamed Billie by his mother after which legend of the American frontier?
Buffalo Bill
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.
Q 03Which fictional detective did Billy Wilder give a 'private life' in a 1970 film?
Sherlock Holmes
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.
Q 04Which crooner starred in Billy Wilder's 1948 musical The Emperor Waltz?
Bing Crosby
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.
Q 05Billy Wilder turned his weeks as a hired dance partner in a 1920s Berlin hotel into what?
A newspaper serial
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!'
Q 06Which two future Hollywood directors made the 1930 Berlin film People on Sunday with Wilder?
Fred Zinnemann and Robert Siodmak
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.
Q 07After fleeing Hitler's Germany in 1933, Wilder made his directorial debut in which city?
Paris
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.
Q 08Wilder co-wrote Ninotchka, the 1939 Greta Garbo comedy sold with which tagline?
Garbo Laughs!
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.
Q 09Who was Wilder's screenwriting partner on films from Ninotchka to Sunset Boulevard?
Charles Brackett
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.
Q 10Wilder's Hollywood directorial debut in 1942 was which comedy starring Ginger Rogers?
The Major and the Minor
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.
Q 11With which other crime novelist did Wilder adapt James M. Cain's Double Indemnity?
Raymond Chandler
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.
Q 12Double Indemnity opens with the wounded Walter Neff confessing into what device?
A dictaphone
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.
Q 13Cain's Double Indemnity drew on which 1927 case of a wife and lover killing her husband?
The Ruth Snyder murder
Q 21Which silent-film star played the deluded Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard?
Gloria Swanson
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.
Q 22Which actor was signed to play Sunset Boulevard's Joe Gillis but withdrew just before filming, giving William Holden the part?
Montgomery Clift
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.
Q 23Norma Desmond's bridge partners, whom Joe calls "the waxworks", included which silent comedian playing himself?
Buster Keaton
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.
Q 14In Double Indemnity, the policy pays double if Phyllis's husband seems to die in which unlikely way?
A fall from a train
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.
Q 15Wilder cast which star of light comedies against type as the murderous Walter Neff in Double Indemnity?
Fred MacMurray
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.
Q 16Wilder's The Lost Weekend (1945) was a stark portrait of one man's battle with what?
Alcoholism
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.
Q 17Who won the Best Actor Oscar as the struggling writer Don Birnam in The Lost Weekend?
Ray Milland
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.
Q 18Like The Lost Weekend, which of these won both Best Picture and the top prize at Cannes?
Parasite
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.
Q 19Wilder directed Death Mills, a 1945 documentary about Nazi atrocities, for which audience?
Germans
His own mother, stepfather and grandmother were murdered in the Holocaust.
Q 20Sunset Boulevard opens with the narrator's body floating where?
In a swimming pool
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.
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.
Q 24Which director plays himself in Sunset Boulevard, visited by Norma during a shoot?
Cecil B. DeMille
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.
Q 25Norma Desmond has written a script for her comeback about which biblical figure?
Salome
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.
Q 26A sign on Wilder's office wall asked how which director, his idol, would do it?
Ernst Lubitsch
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.
Q 27Sunset Boulevard won three of its eleven Oscar nominations but lost Best Picture to which film?
All About Eve
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.
Q 28William Holden won his Best Actor Oscar as a cynical wheeler-dealer in which Wilder film?
Stalag 17
Stalag 17. Holden reportedly asked for his character to be made more likeable; Wilder refused, and the unsoftened part won the Oscar.
Q 29Which fellow director plays the sadistic camp commandant in Wilder's 1953 prisoner-of-war film?
Otto Preminger
Otto Preminger. Himself a Jewish emigre from Vienna, he had made Nazis his acting speciality ever since casting himself as one on Broadway.
Q 30In Sabrina, Audrey Hepburn plays the daughter of a wealthy family's what?
Chauffeur
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.