William Wyler

• 1. Introduction

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  William Wyler walked away from the set of Ben-Hur in 1959 having just overseen a chariot race that took six months to film. The budget had ballooned from $7 million to $15 million, and everyone on the lot knew that if the picture failed, MGM might go bankrupt. It did not fail. Ben-Hur won 11 Oscars, a feat no film would match until Titanic in 1997. That single film sits at the center of a career so decorated it strains belief: twelve nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director, three wins, fourteen actors guided to Oscar victories, and thirty-six performers nominated. No director in Academy history has directed more actors to Oscar-nominated performances. The questions worth asking are not simply what Wyler achieved, but how a haberdasher's son from Alsace-Lorraine built that record, what it cost him personally, and why so many of the greatest actors of the twentieth century said he changed how they worked.

• 2. From Mulhouse to Hollywood

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  Wyler was born on the 1st of July, 1902, in Mulhouse, Alsace-Lorraine, then part of the German Empire. His father Leopold had started as a traveling salesman and built a prosperous haberdashery business. His mother Melanie was a cousin of Carl Laemmle, the founder of Universal Pictures. As a boy, Wyler attended multiple schools and earned a reputation as "something of a hellraiser," being expelled more than once. His mother brought him and his older brother Robert to concerts, opera, theatre, and early cinema, which planted something in the young troublemaker that haberdashery never could.

  After World War I, Alsace-Lorraine passed back to France, and Wyler spent a dispiriting year in Paris working at a shop called 100.000 Chemises, selling shirts and ties. He was so short of money that he wandered the Pigalle district to pass the time. His mother, recognizing that Willi was not cut out for shirts and ties, wrote to her cousin Carl Laemmle. Laemmle made a habit of visiting Europe each year to recruit promising young men. In 1921, he hired Wyler and booked him onto a ship to New York. On that voyage, Wyler met a young Czech named Paul Kohner, who would later become a famous independent talent agent. Their first-class crossing ended with a practical shock: both young men discovered they would have to repay the ship's fare from a $25 weekly wage as messengers at Universal.

  Wyler arrived in Los Angeles around 1923 and started at the bottom, working in the studio's swing gang, cleaning stages and moving sets. His work ethic was, by his own admission, uneven. He slipped away to play billiards across the street or organized card games during working hours. He was fired at least once before he refocused and pushed his way up to third assistant director. By 1925, he was the youngest director on the Universal lot, turning out the westerns the studio was famous for producing. He became so absorbed in the work that he reportedly dreamed of different ways an actor could mount a horse.

• 3. The Perfectionist's Method

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  On the set of Jezebel, Wyler put Henry Fonda through forty consecutive takes of a single scene, offering no direction between each attempt except the word "Again!" When Fonda pressed him for more guidance, Wyler's full response was: "It stinks." Decades later, when Charlton Heston asked what was wrong with his performance in Ben-Hur, Wyler told him simply to "be better." These were not tantrums. They were a method, and the actors who endured it almost always described the results in the same terms. Heston said it was like getting the works in a Turkish bath: "You darn near drown, but you come out smelling like a rose."

  Film historian Ian Freer called Wyler a "bona fide perfectionist" whose appetite for retakes "became the stuff of legend." The nickname that stuck to him on sets was "40-take Wyler." What the retakes produced, across decades, was a body of critically acclaimed performances that no other director has matched in sheer volume. Bette Davis, who won her second Oscar for Wyler's 1938 film Jezebel, told Merv Griffin in 1972 that Wyler had trained her to be a "far, far better actress" than she had been. She recalled a scene that was no more than a bare paragraph in the script. Without a single line of dialogue, she said, "Willy created a scene of power and tension. This was moviemaking on the highest plane."

  Laurence Olivier, whom Wyler directed in Wuthering Heights in 1939, credited Wyler with teaching him how to act for the screen, even though the two clashed repeatedly during the shoot. Critic Frank S. Nugent wrote in the New York Times that Wyler had directed the film magnificently. And when Wyler died, Davis, accepting the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1977, thanked him by name. She summed up the collaboration in her own words later: "It was he who helped me to realize my full potential as an actress. I met my match in this exceptionally creative and talented director."

• 4. Deep Focus and Gregg Toland

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  Gregg Toland, the cinematographer who shot Citizen Kane in 1940, worked with Wyler on six films, most of them in the 1930s and 1940s, and their partnership produced some of the most technically ambitious images in Hollywood history. Toland's deep-focus method kept every object in the frame, from the nearest foreground to the farthest wall, in sharp focus at the same time, giving scenes an illusion of real depth. Wyler used this to keep actors and spatial relationships in a single unbroken shot rather than cutting to close-ups.

  For Wuthering Heights in 1939, Toland's use of low angles, dark shadows, and diffusion won him the Oscar for best cinematography. Two years later, on The Little Foxes, the two men worked closely together to carry the hard-edged deep focus they had refined on their earlier films into a story of corrosive family wealth. They also invented a completely white make-up scheme for Bette Davis in that film, to convey what Wyler saw as her character's hollowness.

  Their most celebrated collaboration was The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946, Toland's last major work with Wyler. The film followed three American servicemen struggling to readjust to civilian life after World War II. The deep-focus technique becomes most vivid in a scene where the three veterans end up at the same bar, none of them able to remain in their own homes. The film's closing image, a family wedding dispersing until two young lovers are left alone across an empty living room, is achieved in a single take that Wyler described as capturing the stunned stillness of people uncertain about their own futures.

• 5. Wyler at War

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  In 1941, Wyler directed Mrs. Miniver, the story of a middle-class English family living through the German bombing of London. The film was openly intended to soften American isolationism. U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom Joseph Kennedy pressured the studios to stop making pro-British pictures, arguing that British defeat was likely. MGM producer Eddie Mannix rejected that pressure, saying that someone should salute England and that even a loss of $100,000 would be acceptable. Mrs. Miniver went on to win six Academy Awards and became the top box office hit of 1942.

  President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill both admired the film. Roosevelt had prints rushed to theaters nationwide. The Voice of America radio network broadcast the minister's speech from the film; magazines reprinted it, and copies were dropped by leaflet over German-occupied countries. Churchill sent a telegram to MGM chief Louis B. Mayer declaring that "Mrs. Miniver is propaganda worth 100 battleships."

  Wyler did not stay at home to celebrate. Between 1942 and 1945, he served as a major in the United States Army Air Forces. He directed two wartime documentaries: The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress in 1944, and Thunderbolt! in 1947. For The Memphis Belle, he flew on actual bombing missions over enemy territory in 1943. On one flight, he lost consciousness from oxygen deprivation. His associate, cinematographer Harold J. Tannenbaum, a First Lieutenant, was shot down and killed during the filming. Working on Thunderbolt!, Wyler was exposed to such damaging noise that he passed out. When he came around, he was deaf in one ear. Partial hearing eventually returned, with the help of a hearing aid, years later. He came home a lieutenant colonel and a disabled veteran.

  Back in Hollywood and unsure whether he could still work, Wyler returned to the subject that was most personal to him. The Best Years of Our Lives drew on his own experience of coming home after three years away, and the film won him his second Academy Award for Best Director.

• 6. Actors and Legacies

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  Audrey Hepburn had never had a starring role in an American film when Wyler cast her in Roman Holiday in 1953. She won the Academy Award for Best Actress. Barbra Streisand had performed the Broadway musical Funny Girl for seven hundred performances before Wyler directed her debut film of the same name in 1968. She won Best Actress and became, in Wyler's count, the thirteenth actor to win an Oscar under his direction.

  Wyler described what drew him to both women in similar terms. He had sensed in Streisand the same quality of dedication he had recognized in Bette Davis early in her career. "It just needed to be controlled and toned down for the movie camera," he said. Of Hepburn, years after Roman Holiday, he placed her in a category he reserved for almost no one: "In that league there's only ever been Garbo, and the other Hepburn, and maybe Bergman. It's a rare quality, but boy, do you know when you've found it."

  Olivia de Havilland had seen The Heiress onstage in New York and telephoned Wyler to push him toward buying the rights for Paramount. He flew to New York, saw the play, and convinced the studio to acquire it. De Havilland won her second Oscar for the 1949 film, and one critic observed that her performance was "that could strike envy even in the most versatile and successful actress."

  By the end of his career, thirty-six of the actors Wyler directed had received Oscar nominations, and fourteen had won. No other director in the history of the Academy holds that record. His films collectively garnered more awards for participating artists and actors than those of any other director in Hollywood history. He also shares with Steven Spielberg the record for directing the greatest number of Best Picture nominees, at thirteen.

• 7. Final Years

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  Wyler was briefly married to actress Margaret Sullavan from November 1934 to March 1936. He married Margaret Talllichet, known as Talli, on the 23rd of October, 1938, and they remained together until his death. They had five children: Catherine, Judith, William Jr., Melanie, and David. His daughter Catherine later said that her mother served as a kind of gatekeeper for him, reading and filtering the scripts that were sent his way.

  On the 24th of July, 1981, Wyler gave an interview to his daughter Catherine for a PBS documentary about his life and career titled Directed by William Wyler. Three days later, on the 27th of July, he died of a heart attack. He was interred at Forest Lawn Memorial-Park in Glendale, California. Many of his home movies, preserved by the Academy Film Archive, were formally restored in 2017.