Billy Wilder

The writer-director Billy Wilder was responsible for some of the most unforgettable stories in cinema history, from Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, to Some Like It Hot and The Apartment. Ellen E Jones and Mark Kermode celebrate his extraordinary career and ask - what was the Wilder touch?
Born in Sucha, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in 1906, Wilder began his career as a journalist in Vienna, before moving to Berlin in the 1920s. In 1933, as a Jewish man fleeing the Nazi regime, he left Europe for Hollywood, where he became one of the leading figures in the studio…