Billy Wilder: from poor Austrian journalist to Hollywood superstar
The director’s newly translated writings reveal how his life as a penniless reporter shaped his hit movies
Marilyn Monroe as Sugar Kane, singer and ukulele player for the female band in Some Like It Hot. Photograph: APL Archive/Alamy
Marilyn Monroe as Sugar Kane, singer and ukulele player for the female band in Some Like It Hot. Photograph: APL Archive/Alamy
DonnaFerguson
Sun 18 Apr 2021 03.30 EDT
In an arresting scene from one of director Billy Wilder’s most famous films,
Some Like It Hot, Marilyn Monroe sashays along a Chicago railway station platform in a figure-hugging outfit, leaving Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis gobsmacked.
Long before the award-winning Hollywood screenwriter and director Billy Wilder spelled his first name with a
y, in faithful adherence to the ways of his adopted homeland, he was known and widely published, in Berlin and Vienna as Billie Wilder. At birth, on June 22, 1906, in a small Galician town called Sucha, less than twenty miles northwest of Kraków, he was given the name Samuel in memory of his maternal grandfather. His mother, Eugenia, however, preferred the name Billie. She had already taken to calling her first son, Wilhelm, two years Billie’s senior, Willie. As a young girl, Eugenia had crossed the Atlantic and lived in New York City for several years with a jeweler uncle in his Madison Avenue apartment. At some point during that formative stay, she caught a performance of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West touring show, and her affection for the exotic name stuck, even without the
SHILDON is not renowned for its glamour or for its exotic luxury. If it has fame, it is for being the cradle of the railways, the crib of heavy industry, so if it were to be associated with an item of clothing, it would surely be the miner s overall or the railwayman s donkey jacket, made dirty through the sweat of years of honest labouring. Yet until 30 years ago, Shildon was famed throughout the Eastern Bloc for producing the finest, most luxurious, fur coats. Whenever a Communist was cold, he reached for his Shildon fake fur coat, made from bri-nylon furleen , and promoted by Lionel Blair, the king of camp.