Cornel Wilde Collection

Cornel Wilde
(1912 – 1989)

They say that in Hollywood, timing is everything. How many times have we heard the story of the leading man who got the part because he just happened to attend the right party or the starlet who was discovered because she stopped at the right drugstore for an ice cream soda? With the importance of timing and luck, it is amazing that Cornel Wilde managed to become as big a star as he did. He didn't get his breakout role until he was 33. When he did land the part, everyone was sure that the role was all wrong for him. Everyone, that is, except Cornel Wilde.

The film was A Song to Remember (1945), the biography of classical composer Chopin who was dying of tuberculosis. Tall, dark and athletic, the producers and studio were a hard sell to the idea that Wilde could play the tubercular composer. Even though he knew that the role was against type, Wilde persisted, and after the producers looked at "every other actor" in town, he was given the role and was nominated for an Academy Award. Now an established star, he would go on to become a respected film maker both in front of and behind the camera.

Although he is often listed as a Manhattan native (part of a ruse early in his acting career to appear younger), Wilde was in fact born Kornel Lajos Weisz in Hungary, 1912. His father, who was in the cosmetics business, brought the family to New York where the family name was Americanized to Wilde. Cornel was a talented linguist and an accomplished mimic. He was also an athlete, qualifying for the 1936 US Olympic fencing team. He expected to take time out from his pre-med studies to go to Berlin, but was bitten by the acting bug instead. He gave up the Olympics and medicine to take a part in a small production.

His fencing background would pay off for his acting career. Wilde was hired as fencing coach for Laurence Olivier's 1940 Broadway production of Romeo and Juliet (Wilde was also cast as Tybalt). Since the stars of the play were also working in movies, rehearsals for the play took place in California, and Cornel used the chance to make connections in the movie industry. He managed to land a contract and mostly played heavies and leads in B pictures until Fox used him as an apprentice hoodlum with Humphrey Bogart in High Sierra (1941).

After the success of A Song to Remember, Wilde went on to star in a series of swashbucklers and melodramas. Although films like A Thousand and One Nights (1945), The Bandit of Sherwood Forest (1946), Shockproof (1949) and Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) were successful, the roles began to feel routine and boring to Wilde. He gave up a $150,000 studio contract to start his own production company in the mid-1950s.

Theodora Productions specialized in relatively low budget but well made films, more often than not shot overseas. In 1955, Wilde starred with his wife in The Big Combo with his wife, Jean Wallace. Omar Khayyam was released in 1957, but one of the company's biggest risks was 1965's The Naked Prey. The story was loosely based on Colter's Run, a historic incident where mountain man John Colter, a former member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, was captured by a band of Blackfoot warriors. Colter was stripped naked and told to run for his life. Even with a band of Blackfeet in hot pursuit, Colter escaped with his life. The Naked Prey was filmed in Africa to save money, and despite its somewhat seedy premise and occasionally violent content, plenty of fans paid to see 52 year old Wilde running through most of the movie dressed only in a loin-cloth.

Three days after his 77th birthday, Cornel Wilde died of leukemia on October 16, 1989. Cornel Wilde's contributions to Motion Pictures are honored by a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1635 Vine St.