One of my favourite stories about Billy Wilder goes like this. One day, late in his career, he arrived at a Hollywood studio to pitch a new idea to a producer. The producer turned out to be a young man who clearly didn’t know much about classic cinema. He told Billy that he wasn’t familiar with his work and could he perhaps run through a few of his films for him.
Billy looked at the man and said, “Fine, after you . . .”
I’m betting that whatever this guy had produced it couldn’t compare with Billy’s dazzling line-up of classic films.
Billy Wilder was born in 1906 in Sucha Beskidzka, a town now in Poland but then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Billy was born Samuel but his mother had been to America and seen Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. She enjoyed it so much she decided to nickname her son Billy. The family later moved to Vienna, where his father Max tried his hand at various business ventures, including being part-owner of a hotel-restaurant.
The young Wilder developed a taste for sharp observation early on. He worked as a newspaper reporter in Vienna and was very keen on jazz. His articles about bandleader Paul Whiteman led to an invitation to follow the band to Berlin and Billy decided to stay on as a freelance reporter. Berlin in the 1920s was alive with ideas, cabaret, and cinema and Wilder soaked it all in. He began to mingle with people from the German film industry and soon moved into screenwriting.
Wilder received screen credit for 13 films produced in Germany between 1929 and 1933, but his promising career in Berlin was cut short. In 1933, the Nazis came to power. That year his father died and Wilder arranged for him to be buried in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin. With Hitler consolidating power and Jews being targeted, Wilder realised he had no future in Germany. After the Reichstag fire, he fled to Paris. There, he continued screenwriting and even co-directed his first film, Mauvaise Graine (1934). Shortly afterwards, he sold a script to Columbia Studios in Hollywood, and with that invitation he sailed for America.
Breaking into Hollywood
Wilder’s early days in Hollywood weren’t easy. His English was poor and he shared an apartment with fellow émigré Peter Lorre and made ends meet by hustling for work.
What Wilder did have though, was persistence and wit. He began writing screenplays with Charles Brackett, a more established writer with fluent English. The Wilder-Brackett partnership became one of the most productive in Hollywood, blending Brackett’s sophistication with Wilder’s bite. Together they worked on hits such as Ninotchka (1939), a satirical comedy famously marketed with the tagline: “Garbo Laughs!”
That success cemented Wilder’s reputation and he began to move from writing into directing. He felt screenwriters were too often mistreated by directors and the only way to protect his work was to get behind the camera himself.
Wilder the Director
Wilder’s breakthrough as a director came with Double Indemnity (1944), a dark tale of lust, greed and murder. Co-written with Raymond Chandler, the film became a defining example of film noir. Wilder used shadows, venetian blinds and Los Angeles locations to give the story a hard-edged realism. It was controversial at the time—Barbara Stanwyck plotting insurance fraud and murder was considered scandalous—but it became a critical and commercial success.
From there, the hits kept coming. Wilder had an uncanny ability to move between genres: crime thrillers, social dramas, romantic comedies and biting satires. His motto was “If you’re going to tell the truth, be funny or they’ll kill you.”
In The Lost Weekend (1945), Wilder tackled alcoholism with unflinching honesty. The film, starring Ray Milland, was one of the first Hollywood movies to show addiction as a serious disease rather than a comic weakness. It won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director.
Then came Sunset Boulevard (1950), perhaps Wilder’s masterpiece and my personal favourite of Wilder’s films. The film begins with a dead man floating in a swimming pool, narrating his own murder—a narrative device that was bold, even shocking at the time. Gloria Swanson’s portrayal of fading silent film star Norma Desmond gave us one of cinema’s most haunting lines. Writer Joe Gillis played by William Holden is trying to get away from two guys who want to repossess his car. To evade them he drives into what he thinks is an abandoned mansion. He is surprised to find it occupied by the once famous silent film star Norma Desmond played by Gloria Swanson. He recognises her and comments “You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big.” Norma replies, “I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.” The movie was both a scathing satire of Hollywood and a deeply human tragedy. It’s also interesting from a lot of angles; we see the famous Schwab’s drug store, once a Hollywood icon but now gone. Director Cecil B DeMille plays himself and when we see Joe and Norma spending an evening watching her old films, they are actually Gloria Swanson’s old films and one was directed by none other than Erich Von Stroheim who plays Norma’s butler and former husband.
Comedy with an Edge
Although Wilder made some of the darkest films in Hollywood, he was equally skilled at comedy. In fact, many of his comedies remain among the most beloved of all time. Some Like It Hot (1959) paired Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis as musicians on the run, disguising themselves as women in an all-female band. Add Marilyn Monroe to the mix and you had comedy gold. The film was outrageous for its time and famously ends with Joe E. Brown’s immortal line, “Nobody’s perfect.”
Marilyn tested both Wilder and her co stars as she was notoriously late and struggled with her lines. One infamous scene required 47 takes and all Monroe had to say was ‘it’s me, Sugar’. Wilder wasn’t happy because Marilyn wanted to change scenes and dialogue which he didn’t want to do. The final result though was a classic comedy.
The film’s closing line, “Well, nobody’s perfect”, is ranked 78th on The Hollywood Reporter list of Hollywood’s 100 Favourite Movie Lines and Wilder’s tombstone pays homage to the line with the inscription, “I’m a writer, but then, nobody’s perfect”.
Two years later, Wilder directed The Apartment (1960), a film that managed to be both romantic and cynical. Jack Lemmon plays an office worker who lets his bosses use his apartment for their affairs, only to fall for Shirley MacLaine’s elevator operator. The film mixes laughter with melancholy, revealing Wilder’s genius for blending tones. It won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay.
Wilder also directed Sabrina (1954), with Audrey Hepburn caught between Humphrey Bogart and William Holden, and The Seven Year Itch (1955), which gave us the iconic image of Monroe’s skirt billowing over a subway grate. He seemed to have a knack for capturing cultural moments while keeping his characters grounded and relatable.
Wilder’s Style and Legacy
What made Billy Wilder so special? Partly it was his range. Few directors could move from the bleak cynicism of Ace in the Hole (1951), a savage attack on media exploitation, to the screwball energy of Some Like It Hot. He didn’t stick to one style or genre; instead, he reshaped them.
His dialogue sparkled with wit, but underneath there was always truth. Wilder had an outsider’s eye—he never forgot that he was an immigrant looking at America with both fascination and scepticism. His characters often chase the American dream but collide with its hypocrisies and disappointments.
Wilder also had a reputation for precision. He was meticulous with scripts, often refusing improvisation. “You have to have a dream so you can get up in the morning,” he once said, “but dreams don’t last long.” His films carried that same bittersweet edge.
By the end of his career, Wilder had won six Oscars and left behind a body of work that filmmakers still study. When asked how he wanted to be remembered, he reportedly quipped: “I’m a writer, but then nobody’s perfect.
The Final Word
Billy Wilder died in 2002 at the age of 95. He had outlived most of his contemporaries and watched Hollywood change beyond recognition. Yet his films remain fresh. Watch Sunset Boulevard today, or Some Like It Hot; both are hugely entertaining.
So, when that young producer asked Wilder to list his films, he was showing his ignorance of a screen legend. His legacy speaks louder than any pitch meeting. And the truth is, even if “nobody’s perfect,” Billy Wilder came pretty close.
Letters from an Unknown Author! 