Billy Wilder

Billy Wilder (born Samuel Wilder, June 22, 1906 to March 27, 2002) was an Austrian and American film director and screenwriter whose Hollywood career spanned five decades and who is regarded as one of America's most versatile filmmakers. Born into a Polish-Jewish family in Sucha, Galicia, Austria-Hungary, he moved to Vienna in 1916 and worked as a journalist before relocating to Berlin to begin a screenwriting career; the rise of the Nazi Party and antisemitism in Germany drove him to Paris and then, in 1934, to Hollywood. He had an early hit co-writing the screenplay for Ninotchka (1939), then established himself as a director with Double Indemnity (1944), a film noir cowritten with Raymond Chandler that earned his first Academy Award nomination for Best Director. He won Academy Awards for Best Director, Best Screenplay and Best Picture for The Lost Weekend (1945), and went on to direct Sunset Boulevard (1950), Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment (1960), accumulating seven competitive Academy Awards among 21 nominations across his career.