William Wyler Trivia
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59 free William Wyler trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This William Wyler trivia quiz covers the most Oscar-nominated director in Hollywood history, from silent Universal westerns to Funny Girl. The easy questions are ones any classic-film fan can attempt: the three films that won him Best Director, the epic with the chariot race, the actress he introduced in Roman Holiday, and the star whose debut he directed in 1968. From there it moves into the films and the people around them: Bette Davis and Jezebel, Olivier and Wuthering Heights, Gregg Toland's deep focus, Harold Russell's two Oscars, Dalton Trumbo's uncredited script, and Wyler's wartime documentaries. The harder end is for cinephiles: his birthplace in Alsace, the cousin who owned Universal, his first sound film in the Mojave, the record streak of Best Director nominations, the 40-take nickname and what he told Henry Fonda, the leg he offered Kirk Douglas, the actor whose graylisting he broke, the Palme d'Or, the Thalberg award, the film he quit before Patton and the mentor role he played for John Huston. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries on Wyler and his films before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our classic Hollywood, Academy Awards and Audrey Hepburn quizzes next.
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Q 01As of 2025, which director alone has won more Best Director Oscars than William Wyler's three?
John Ford
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.
Q 02At which Roman landmark did Gregory Peck fool his co-star by hiding his hand in William Wyler's Roman Holiday?
The Mouth of Truth
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.
Q 03Which contested border region holds Mulhouse, William Wyler's birthplace?
Alsace
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.
Q 04Wyler's mother was a cousin of which studio founder, who gave him his start?
Carl Laemmle
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.
Q 05Which studio gave William Wyler his first directing jobs, on dozens of silent westerns in the 1920s?
Universal
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.
Q 06William Wyler's first all-talking film, Hell's Heroes, told a story later filmed again as 3 Godfathers with which star?
John Wayne
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.
Q 07Which actor played gambler Nick Arnstein in William Wyler's 1968 musical Funny Girl?
Omar Sharif
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.
Q 08William Wyler's first Best Director nomination came for which 1936 film about a retired car maker?
Dodsworth
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.
Q 09Which novelist wrote the story of a retired car maker touring Europe that William Wyler filmed in 1936?
Sinclair Lewis
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.
Q 10Which cinematographer, famous for Citizen Kane, worked with Wyler on Wuthering Heights, The Little Foxes and The Best Years of Our Lives?
Gregg Toland
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.
Q 11Which camera technique, also a hallmark of Citizen Kane, did William Wyler use to stage scenes in long, uncut takes?
Deep focus
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.
Q 12Bette Davis won her second Oscar for which 1938 Wyler film?
Jezebel
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.
Q 13Which actor played the banker fiancé who jilts Bette Davis in William Wyler's 1938 drama of old New Orleans?
Henry Fonda
Q 21What lasting injury did Wyler suffer while making the documentary Thunderbolt!?
He went deaf in one ear
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.
Q 22Which producer commissioned the story behind Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives?
Samuel Goldwyn
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.
Q 23Non-actor Harold Russell, who played Homer in The Best Years of Our Lives, had lost what during his wartime Army service?
Both hands
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.
Q 14Which actor received his first Oscar nomination for Wyler's Wuthering Heights and credited him with teaching him to act for the screen?
Laurence Olivier
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.
Q 15Vivien Leigh wanted Cathy in Wyler's Wuthering Heights, but who played her?
Merle Oberon
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.
Q 16Which director, whose actor father starred in William Wyler's A House Divided, called Wyler his best friend in the industry?
John Huston
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.
Q 17Mrs. Miniver, Wyler's first Best Director winner, starred Walter Pidgeon and which actress, who won Best Actress?
Greer Garson
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.
Q 18Which wartime leader is said to have likened Mrs. Miniver to a fleet of battleships?
Winston Churchill
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.
Q 19Which US ambassador to Britain urged studios to stop making pro-British films because he believed British defeat was imminent?
Joseph Kennedy
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.
Q 20Wyler's 1944 wartime documentary followed the crew of which type of aircraft?
A Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress
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.
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.
Q 24Who won Best Actor for The Best Years of Our Lives?
Fredric March
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.
Q 25William Wyler's 1949 film The Heiress was based on which Henry James novel?
Washington Square
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.
Q 26Which actress won Best Actress for her first starring role in Wyler's Roman Holiday?
Audrey Hepburn
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.
Q 27Which blacklisted screenwriter wrote Roman Holiday's story but received no screen credit for it until decades later?
Dalton Trumbo
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.
Q 28Which William Wyler film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1957?
Friendly Persuasion
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.
Q 29William Wyler filmed Ben-Hur's chariot race in a vast arena built at which European film studio?
Cinecittà
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.
Q 30Which rodeo champion turned stunt pioneer staged Ben-Hur's chariot race alongside Andrew Marton?
Yakima Canutt
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.