Maximilian Schell, 1930–2014

When Austrian-born actor Maximilian Schell won the Best Actor Academy Award in 1962 for his role in Judgment at Nuremberg, he gave a short speech about being questioned by a customs officer when he first arrived in the U.S. “He was asking me what I was doing here, and I said, ‘I’m going to do a film.’ And he said to me, ‘Good luck, boy,’” Schell said with his Oscar in hand. “I can tell him now that I had it.” In fact, Schell undoubtedly “made his own luck,” said the Los Angeles Times. He appeared in more than 100 movies and TV productions; directed films, documentaries, plays, and operas; and became a successful concert pianist and conductor. “I don’t think I’m an actor,” he said in 2011. “I’m a creator—or try to be.”

Born in Vienna to a playwright and a stage actress, Schell fled to Switzerland with his Catholic family when the Nazis annexed Austria in 1938. After studying at the universities of Zurich and Munich, he spent four years touring Europe as an actor, “polishing his French, German and Italian, and learning enough English to read and understand Shakespeare,” said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). He still couldn’t really speak English when he was invited to Hollywood to play a Nazi lieutenant in the 1958 film The Young Lions, but finally managed “by speaking phonetically.”

His second Hollywood movie, Judgment at Nuremberg, a dramatization of the World War II war crimes tribunal, turned Schell into an international star. The film’s all-star cast included Spencer Tracy and Montgomery Clift, but Schell’s portrayal of the eloquent and furious German defense lawyer “was the only one honored by the academy,” said The New York Times. Schell went on to become a staple in Nazi-era movies, playing an SS officer in 1974’s The Odessa File and 1977’s A Bridge Too Far, and a Wehrmacht officer in Cross of Iron (1977). His films also touched on the legacy of World War II when he worked behind the camera. He produced and directed 1973’s The Pedestrian, about a businessman with a secret Nazi past, winning a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film.

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Perhaps Schell’s most significant film as director was his 1984 documentary on Marlene Dietrich, Marlene. Dietrich allowed her voice “to be recorded but refused to be filmed,” said The Washington Post, “bringing out the most in Schell’s talent to penetrate images and uncover reality.” He compared the art of directing to making a sculpture. “Michelangelo said that in every rock there’s a figure hidden,” Schell explained. “All you have to do is carve it out. With care, not haste.”