Billy Wilder

Career Trajectory

Wilder began as a journalist and ghostwriter in Weimar Berlin before emigrating to Hollywood in the 1930s, where he apprenticed as a screenwriter before making his directorial debut with The Major and the Minor (1942). His collaboration with Raymond Chandler on Double Indemnity (1944) announced him as a major talent, but it was the string of masterpieces in the 1950s and 1960s—Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment—that secured his place as one of cinema's supreme stylists, a filmmaker who married genre entertainment with profound psychological insight and moral complexity.