Billy Wilder
Billy Wilder (1906–2002) was an Austrian-born American filmmaker, one of the towering writer-directors of classical Hollywood. Born Samuel Wilder in Sucha, Galicia, he worked as a journalist in Vienna and then a screenwriter in Berlin before fleeing the rise of the Nazis, briefly to Paris and then to Hollywood in 1934. He partnered with Charles Brackett and later I.A.L. Diamond on some of the most acid and well-crafted screenplays of the studio era, and across six decades he directed Double Indemnity (1944), the Hollywood-eats-its-own Sunset Boulevard (1950), the courtroom Witness for the Prosecution, the cross-dressing farce Some Like It Hot (1959) — atop the AFI's list of greatest American comedies — and the romantic comedy The Apartment (1960), which swept the Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay Oscars. He won seven Academy Awards across twenty-one nominations.