Maximilian Schell

Maximilian Schell (8 December 1930 – 1 February 2014) was an Austrian-born Swiss actor, who also wrote, directed and produced some of his own films. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the 1961 American film Judgment at Nuremberg, his second acting role in Hollywood. Born in Austria, his parents were involved in the arts and he grew up surrounded by performance and literature. While he was still a child, his family fled to Switzerland in 1938 when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, and they settled in Zurich. After World War II ended, Schell took up acting and directing full-time. He appeared in numerous German films, often anti-war, before moving to Hollywood. Fluent in both English and German, Schell earned top billing in a number of Nazi-era themed films. Two earned him Oscar nominations: The Man in the Glass Booth (1975), for a character with two identities, and Julia (1977), portraying a member of a group resisting Nazism. His range of portrayals included personalities as diverse as Venezuelan leader Simón Bolívar, Russian emperor Peter the Great, and physicist Albert Einstein. For his role as Vladimir Lenin in the television film Stalin (1992) he won the Golden Globe Award. Schell also performed in a number of stage plays, including a celebrated performance as Prince Hamlet. Schell was an accomplished pianist and conductor, performing with Claudio Abbado and Leonard Bernstein, and with orchestras in Berlin and Vienna. His elder sister was the internationally noted actress Maria Schell; he produced the documentary tribute My Sister Maria in 2002. Schell was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of Margarethe (née Noe von Nordberg), an actress who ran an acting school, and Hermann Ferdinand Schell, a Swiss poet, novelist, playwright and pharmacy owner. His parents were Roman Catholic. Schell's father was never enthusiastic about young Maximilian becoming an actor like his mother, feeling that it could not lead to "real happiness". However, Schell was surrounded by acting in his early youth: I grew up in a theatre atmosphere and took it for granted.