He stayed in costume for “The Bandit of Sherwood Forest” and “Forever Amber,” appeared in such melodramas as “Roadhouse,” and “The Walls of Jericho” and then made the Big Top classic “The Greatest Show on Earth” for Cecil B. The pianist off screen was Jose Iturbi.)īut the success proved a Pyrrhic victory, for afterward producers came to consider him fit only for costume dramas. (One critic later said he grew paler and wanner with each reel while fingering an impressive sound track on a mute piano. ‘You’re too healthy’ (to play a tubercular musician).”įinally after three months of testing what Wilde described as “every other actor” in town, he was given the role and received an Oscar nomination. “The powers that be wouldn’t consider it. “When ‘A Song to Remember’ came along (1944), I begged for a test,” he told Hopper. Originally he was cast as a heavy or lead in B pictures, but his dark good looks and a change in studios (to 20th Century Fox) earned him feature parts in such pictures as “Lady With Red Hair” in 1940 and “High Sierra,” in 1941, where he played an apprentice hoodlum to Humphrey Bogart.īut it was as Chopin opposite Merle Oberon as George Sand that Wilde broke out of the pack.
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fencing team that was headed to the 1936 Berlin Olympics yet it was his skill with a foil that would eventually lead him to Broadway and then to motion pictures.Īfter several modest stage productions in New York and on the road, he was hired as a fencing instructor and featured player (Tybalt) in the Laurence Olivier-Vivien Leigh stage production of “Romeo and Juliet.”īecause of the stars’ movie commitments, some of the play’s rehearsals were held in Hollywood and Wilde was offered, and accepted, a Warner Bros. He also gave up his membership on the U.S. In 1935, he won a scholarship to Columbia University, where he hoped to study surgery but instead abandoned his classes after appearances in several stock theater companies whetted his interest in things dramatic. “If I hate a script or think it’s foolish or in bad taste, I’m miserable.”Ī linguist with a command of Hungarian, French, German, Italian and Russian, he was born in New York City to Hungarian-Czech parents but spent much of his formative years in Europe, where he became interested in fencing.Īfter his Hungarian father, who traveled Europe for a cosmetics firm, finally settled in the United States in 1932, Cornelius Louis Wilde studied at City College of New York, intending to become a physician.
“Acting is not just ‘another day, another dollar,’ ” he told columnist Hedda Hopper as long ago as 1954. He moved from studio to studio in quest of satisfying roles and from in front of the camera to behind it when he couldn’t find producers and directors who agreed with his point of view.
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