Mr Wilder and Me is a novel by Jonathan Coe, published in the UK by Viking Books on 5 November 2020. It is a historical novel set in the late 1970s, and tells the story of Hollywood director Billy Wilder's struggles to write, finance and shoot his penultimate film Fedora, as observed through the eyes of a young Greek interpreter. The novel contains a mixture of real and invented characters.
Calista Frangopoulou, a 57-year-old, London-based film composer, is facing a crisis in her life, as her offers of work dry up and her daughter Fran struggles with an unwanted pregnancy. The departure of her other daughter Ariane for Australia triggers a reminiscence about the time she left her then family home in Athens to travel round America in 1976.
On that trip, Calista makes friends with a young English woman, Gill Foley. It's been arranged for Gill to have dinner in Los Angeles with an old friend of her father's, the Hollywood director Billy Wilder. She invites Calista to join her, but disappears halfway through the meal, leaving Calista in the company of Wilder, I.A.L. Diamond and their wives. Calista gets drunk and has to crash out at the Wilders' apartment. The next day she leaves them a thank-you note with her parents' name and address.
One year later, she receives a phone call at her parents' apartment, asking her to work for two weeks as interpreter on the set of Wilder's latest film Fedora. She is flown to Corfu, and then to the village of Nydri on the island of Lefkada. In Nydri, as her work comes to an end, she tells Diamond that she doesn't want to return to her parents just yet, and he arranges for her to be taken on as his assistant in Munich, where the film's interiors are to be shot.
In Munich, at a dinner in honour of the film's composer Miklós Rózsa, Calista listens as Wilder confronts a young German diner who is a proponent of holocaust denial. In a fifty-page flashback presented as a screenplay, Wilder recounts his experience of fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s, then returning to Germany in 1945 to make Death Mills , his documentary about Nazi atrocities, and to search in vain for his mother and other family members, who he concludes must have died in the death camps.
The production of Fedora moves to Paris, where Calista has long conversations with Wilder's and Diamond's wives, and sleeps with Matthew, a young man whose mother is working on the film. After the shooting wraps, an exhausted Wilder and Diamond drink a brief toast, telling each other that "We made it".
A brief epilogue tells of the unsuccessful release of Fedora, and the resolution of Calista's present-day family crisis.
The novel was generally well-received. Alex Preston, writing for The Observer, described it, along with Middle England , as being part of the 'renaissance of Jonathan Coe' after some disappointing novels, and concluded that it was "as good as anything he's written". [1] Writing for The Scotsman , Allan Massie described it as "a bittersweet delight with a dark and horrible background", [2] while Mark Lawson in The Guardian wrote that 'Wilder, charismatically wise-cracking but haunted by history, and Diamond, agonised by the lengthy complexity of turning words into pictures, give the book the feel of a real movie memoir.' [3]
As of 2022 [update] , a film version is in preparation directed by Stephen Frears with the novel being adapted by Christopher Hampton. Wilder will be played by Oscar winner Christoph Waltz, who, like the director, was born in Austria. [4]
The Lost Weekend is a 1945 American film noir drama film directed by Billy Wilder, and starring Ray Milland and Jane Wyman. It was based on Charles R. Jackson's novel of the same name about an alcoholic writer. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and won four: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay. It also shared the Grand Prix at the first Cannes Film Festival, making it one of only three films—the other two being Marty (1955) and Parasite (2019)—to win both the Academy Award for Best Picture and the highest award at Cannes.
The Apartment is a 1960 American romantic comedy film directed and produced by Billy Wilder from a screenplay he co-wrote with I. A. L. Diamond. It stars Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, Fred MacMurray, Ray Walston, Jack Kruschen, David Lewis, Willard Waterman, David White, Hope Holiday and Edie Adams.
Billy Wilder was an Austrian-American film director, producer and screenwriter. His career in Hollywood spanned five decades, and he is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Classic Hollywood cinema. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director eight times, winning twice, and for a screenplay Academy Award 13 times, winning three times.
Double Indemnity is a 1944 American crime film noir directed by Billy Wilder, co-written by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, and produced by Buddy DeSylva and Joseph Sistrom. The screenplay was based on James M. Cain's 1943 novel of the same title, which appeared as an eight-part serial for the Liberty magazine in February 1936.
Sunset Boulevard is a 1950 American black comedy film noir directed and co-written by Billy Wilder, and produced and co-written by Charles Brackett. It was named after a major street that runs through Hollywood, the center of the American movie industry.
Spellbound is a 1945 American psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock, and starring Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, and Michael Chekhov. It follows a psychoanalyst who falls in love with the new head of the Vermont hospital in which she works, only to find that he is an imposter suffering dissociative amnesia, and potentially, a murderer. The film is based on the 1927 novel The House of Dr. Edwardes by Hilary Saint George Saunders and John Palmer.
Quo Vadis is a 1951 American epic film set in ancient Rome during the final years of Emperor Nero's reign, based on the 1896 novel of the same title by Polish Nobel Laureate author Henryk Sienkiewicz. Produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and filmed in Technicolor, it was directed by Mervyn LeRoy from a screenplay by S. N. Behrman, Sonya Levien, and John Lee Mahin. It is the fourth screen adaptation of Sienkiewicz's novel. The film stars Robert Taylor, Deborah Kerr, Leo Genn, and Peter Ustinov, and features Patricia Laffan, Finlay Currie, Abraham Sofaer, Marina Berti, Buddy Baer, and Felix Aylmer. Future Italian stars Sophia Loren and Bud Spencer appeared as uncredited extras. The score is by Miklós Rózsa and the cinematography by Robert Surtees and William V. Skall.
Stage Fright is a 1950 British film noir directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Jane Wyman, Marlene Dietrich, Michael Wilding and Richard Todd. Others in the cast include Alastair Sim, Sybil Thorndike, Kay Walsh, Hitchcock's daughter Pat Hitchcock in her movie debut, and Joyce Grenfell in a vignette.
Dame Frances Rosemary Walsh is a New Zealand screenwriter and film producer.
I. A. L. Diamond was a Moldovan–American screenwriter, best known for his collaborations with Billy Wilder.
Miklós Rózsa was a Hungarian-American composer trained in Germany (1925–1931) and active in France (1931–1935), the United Kingdom (1935–1940), and the United States (1940–1995), with extensive sojourns in Italy from 1953 onward. Best known for his nearly one hundred film scores, he nevertheless maintained a steadfast allegiance to absolute concert music throughout what he called his "double life".
The Seven Year Itch is a 1955 American romantic comedy film directed by Billy Wilder, from a screenplay he co-wrote with George Axelrod from the 1952 three-act play. The film stars Marilyn Monroe and Tom Ewell, who reprised his role. It contains one of the most iconic pop-culture images of the 20th century – Monroe standing on a subway grate as her white dress is blown upwards by a passing train. The titular phrase, which refers to a waning interest in monogamous relationship after seven years of marriage, has been used by psychologists.
Love in the Afternoon is a 1957 American romantic comedy film produced and directed by Billy Wilder and starring Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn and Maurice Chevalier. The screenplay by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond is based on the 1920 Claude Anet novel Ariane, jeune fille russe. The story explores the relationship between a notorious middle-aged American playboy business magnate and the 20-something daughter of a private detective hired to investigate him. The supporting cast features John McGiver and Lise Bourdin.
Marthe Keller is a Swiss actress and opera director. She is perhaps best known for her role in the film Marathon Man (1976), for which she was nominated for a Golden Globe Award.
Fedora is a 1978 German-French drama film directed by Billy Wilder, and starring William Holden and Marthe Keller. The screenplay by Wilder and I.A.L. Diamond is based on Tom Tryon's novella in the collection Crowned Heads.
Seymour Nebenzal was an American-born Jewish-German film producer. He produced 46 films between 1927 and 1961.
Ariane is a 1931 German drama film directed by Paul Czinner and starring Elisabeth Bergner, Rudolf Forster and Annemarie Steinsieck. It is an adaptation of the 1920 French novel Ariane, jeune fille russe by Claude Anet. Two alternative language versions The Loves of Ariane and Ariane, jeune fille russe were made at the same time. The film was the inspiration of the 1957 Billy Wilder film Love in the Afternoon. Wilder remembered the film as "touching and funny".
Number 11 is a novel by British writer Jonathan Coe, published in 2015. The book explores the changing social, economical and cultural landscape of the United Kingdom in the early 21st century. It is connected to Coe's previous novel What a Carve Up!, through shared themes and references to characters and events from the latter.
After is a 2019 American romantic drama film directed by Jenny Gage, based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Anna Todd. The screenplay is written by Susan McMartin, Tamara Chestna, and Jenny Gage. The film stars Josephine Langford and Hero Fiennes Tiffin, and follows an inexperienced teenage girl who begins to romance a mysterious student during her first months of college. The cast includes Selma Blair, Inanna Sarkis, Shane Paul McGhie, Pia Mia, Khadijha Red Thunder, Dylan Arnold, Samuel Larsen, Jennifer Beals, and Peter Gallagher in supporting roles.
Audrey Young was an American film actress and a big-band singer who was most active in the 1940s. She was the wife of director Billy Wilder.