Cornel Wilde

Hungarian-born actor

• Born: October 13, 1915
• Birthplace: Prievidza, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now in Slovakia)
• Died: October 16, 1989
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

In a solid acting career that lasted more than three decades, Wilde epitomized the reliable B-film star. His handsome looks and gentle demeanor translated deftly into a wide variety of leading roles, in romance and adventure films.

Early Life

Cornel Wilde (koor-NEHL wild) was born Kornel Weisz. His father was a moderately successful small business entrepreneur who did considerable traveling to Austria and Poland, bringing his son with him. At an early age, Wilde showed a facility for picking up languages by ear. In addition, he had a talent for mimicking people with whom his father did business, catching accents and facial characteristics with dead-on accuracy. When his family immigrated to the United States in the early 1920’s, his father made it clear to his son that he would become a doctor. Wilde attended Townsend Harris High School in Queens, one of the most prestigious public schools in the country, known for its humanities-based curriculum.

Precocious, Wilde graduated at the age of fourteen. Although interested in studying theater, Wilde enrolled at the City College of New York as a premedical student and completed the course work in just three years. While in school, Wilde found an outlet for his creativity and his athleticism on the college’s fencing team, and he was selected to represent the United States at the 1936 Olympics. He declined, in part because he believed that, considering the fact that he was a Jew, going to Berlin, where the Games were being held, at the height of the Nazi regime was unwise and in part because he wanted to pursue theater opportunities.

Picking up bit parts in Broadway productions (while supporting himself with odd jobs, including selling toys in Macy’s department store and later selling newspaper advertising), he changed his name to Cornel Wilde. He got his break in 1940, when he was asked to coach the renowned British stage actorLaurence Olivier in fencing for his approaching major production of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1595-1596). In return for his help, Wilde was given the role of Tybalt.

Life’s Work

Receiving encouraging reviews for his performances, Wilde headed to Hollywood, under contract to Warner Bros. However, the studio could not decide how to use Wilde; he did not have the commanding charisma of a leading man, but he was far too dashing for backup roles. He was dropped in 1941 but was optioned by Twentieth Century-Fox. In late 1944, after appearing in a series of minor roles, Wilde was cast to play pianist Frédéric Chopin in A Song to Remember (1945). The film manipulated the facts of Chopin’s life to re-create him not as a groundbreaking musician and composer but rather as a fervent Polish nationalist, willing to confront the oppression of the Russian occupation, an obvious metaphor for the plight of the Polish nation then in the grip of the Nazis. Indeed, in creating the character, Wilde drew on his own deep resentment of Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, to give his performance an edge. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor.

Over the next five years, Wilde proved reliably bankable, performing in a string of modestly successful B-films, playing roles in adventures and in romances that capitalized on his virile good looks and his striking athletic build. He played the romantic Aladdin in A Thousand and One Nights (1945), a successful writer who falls under the spell of an obsessive woman responsible for the deaths of his brother and their unborn child in Leave Her to Heaven (1945), a good-natured co-owner of a bowling alley along the Canadian border who is framed for robbery by his psychotic partner in Road House (1948), and a parole officer who falls in love with a dangerous parolee in Shockproof (1949). In each case, Wilde played characters who encounter brutality and who struggle to preserve their optimism and their faith in humanity.

Wilde had a critically praised turn in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1952 circus epic The Greatest Show on Earth as an obsessively competitive trapeze artist who comes to see the folly of such arrogance. As the 1950’s progressed, however, Wilde, then in his fifties, found few offers. Determined to create films that would challenge audiences by drawing on the conventions of film noir, atmospheric films in which traditional notions of good and evil appear muddled, Wilde started his own film company, Theodora Productions, in 1955. Its first production, The Big Combo (1955), featured Wilde in a twisting plot about an earnest police lieutenant who finds his own code of morality eroding as he works to bring down a ruthless crime boss. That endeavor is complicated by the lieutenant’s growing obsession with the crime boss’s beautiful girlfriend (played by Wilde’s wife, Jean Wallace), who is being held against her will. The film drew respectable reviews but did little box office. Although Wilde continued to produce and to star in a series of highly stylized film noir pieces that explored his fascination with violence and humanity’s capacity for evil, it was his work as director and star of the controversial 1966 release The Naked Prey that is regarded as his landmark achievement.

Wilde did little acting in his later years, but he continued to maintain the operations of Theodora Productions, even after he contracted leukemia in the mid-1980’s. He died just after his seventy-fourth birthday in 1989.

Significance

Wilde was a solid success in postwar popular films. His gently transfixing eyes, his soft voice (with its dash of exotic European inflection), and his athletic chest (usually bared) were signatures of his appeal. Wilde is remembered less for the string of successful films he completed immediately after the war and his limited run as a box-office draw in the early 1950’s and more for the eleven avant-garde films he produced, directed, and at times starred in for his production company in the late 1960’s. Unlike many of the actors created by the studio system, whose careers followed a predictable downward trajectory as the public came to crave new faces, Wilde did his most important work after his screen career waned, producing films that testified to his unsettling vision of a complex and a violent humanity.

Bibliography

Chapman, James, and Nicholas J. Cull. Projecting Empire: Imperialism and Popular Cinema. New York: I. B. Tauris, 2009. Uses The Naked Prey as part of a larger exploration of films that depict the often bloody showdown between white colonizers and native tribes.

Friedrich, Otto. City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940’s. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997. A much-admired depiction of Hollywood during Wilde’s emergence as a box-office draw. Offers a compelling critique of the studio system that produced Wilde.

Reid, John. Popular Pictures of the Hollywood 1940’s. London: Lulu, 2004. Extensive overview of the era of Wilde’s theatrical success as a glamorous leading man.