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Fri 5 December 2025 21:30, UK
It’s hard to think of a contemporary filmmaker whose credits could challenge the legendary run that Billy Wilder had during the Golden Age of Hollywood, as the Oscar-winning filmmaker made over a dozen films, many of which are considered to be among the best ever made.
While similar praises could be lent to modern masters like Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese, neither of them wrote all of their own screenplays as Wilder did, whose brilliant use of wordplay and creative means of staging action and comedy made him a draw in his own right.
But that didn’t mean that he didn’t love working with movie stars, and although he would occasionally get into feuds with A-listers, Wilder was someone who actors appreciated working with, which may explain why each of his films has such stacked ensemble casts.
Professionalism and objectivity are important qualities for a director to have on set, as they can’t appear to show favouritism towards any one star, but Wilder did have his soft spots. During the end of his career, he had more frequent interactions with director Cameron Crowe, who wrote about the former’s picks for the best actors he’d worked with, and he unsurprisingly chose Jack Lemmon as one of them, the pair having made seven films together.
Lemmon was the rare actor who was just as skilled at comedy as he was at drama, and Wilder gave him multiple opportunities to showcase the extent of his range with grace, such that their pairing is ranked among the greatest actor-director collaborations of all time, a club which includes Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, John Ford and John Wayne, and Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune.
One of Lemmon’s frequent co-stars was Walter Matthau, of whom Wilder was also a fan, and the three men worked together on films like The Front Page, Buddy Buddy, and The Fortune Cookie, the latter of which earned Matthau an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’. The chemistry between the actor and filmmaker may have seemed to be inherently brilliant, but Wilder’s direction was a major reason why it worked so well.
Interestingly, the final actor that Wilder picked out was Charles Laughton, with whom he had only had the pleasure of working once. Although he had been a legendary star whose career peaked in the ‘30s with The Private Life of Henry VIII and Mutiny on the Bounty, Wilder gave him a juicy comeback role in 1957 when he cast him in the lead of Witness for the Prosecution, a legal thriller based on a popular short story by Agatha Christie.
Christie’s writing would go on to inspire countless films and television shows, but Witness for the Prosecution was the first indication as to why her work was so primed for adaptations. The twisty, clever narrative had the audience on the edge of their seats, and offered Laughton the opportunity to prove once more why he had become a movie star.
The film also came at an interesting time in Laughton’s career, as it was released only two years after his directorial debut, The Night of the Hunter, saw light to middling responses, which ironically would end up having its reputation restored as one of the classic films of the ‘50s, where it warranted being ranked alongside many of Wilder’s best films.
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