Maximilian Schell (8 December 1930 – 1 February 2014) was an Austrian-Swiss actor, director, screenwriter and producer.
Schell was born in Vienna to show business parents (his father was a playwright and novelist and his mother was an actress). After Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in 1938 the family moved to Zurich, Switzerland, which was where Schell grew up. He studied at university in Germany and Switzerland, and served a year in the Swiss Army before following in his mother's footsteps and becoming an actor.
He started out on the stage before making his film debut with German movie Children, Mothers, and a General in 1955. (Klaus Kinski starred.) He made his English-language debut in 1959's The Young Lions opposite Montgomery Clift and Marlon Brando. The 1961 film Judgment at Nuremberg, in which he played a German defense attorney for Nazi war criminals, made him a huge international star and won him an Academy Award for Best Actor.
In the late 1960s Schell began to produce and direct his own projects, eventually directing eight films. Meanwhile, his fluent English got him a lot of parts as either Nazis or persecuted Jews in American World War II movies. He also dipped into sci-fi, taking the lead role in Disney's notorious Box Office Bomb The Black Hole. In his later career Schell continued to work as a character actor while helming such documentaries as Marlene (about Marlene Dietrich) and My Sister Maria (about his older sister, film actress Maria Schell). In 2001 he starred in a Broadway adaptation of Judgement at Nuremberg, this time in the role of Ernst Janning.
When he wasn't busy acting or directing, Schell occasionally moonlighted as a concert pianist. He was married to Russian actress Natalya Andreychenko, with whom he had a daughter, from 1985 to 2005 and to German opera singer Iva Mihanovic from 2013 until his death from pneumonia a year later.
A 1961 German film version of Hamlet, with Schell in the title role, served as the basis for one of the last episodes of the original run of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Schell considered Hamlet one of his favorite roles (on stage, if not in this particular film), and for a 1968 production he even created a new German translation which he considered more faithful to the spirit of Shakespeare's text.
Maximilian Schell on TV Tropes:
- Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
- Topkapi (1964)
- Return From The Ashes (1965)
- Counterpoint (1968)
- First Love (1970) (also directed)
- The Pedestrian (1973) (also directed)
- The Odessa File (1974)
- The Day That Shook the World (1975)
- The Man in the Glass Booth (1975)
- A Bridge Too Far (1977)
- Cross of Iron (1977)
- Julia (1977)
- The Black Hole (1979)
- The Phantom of the Opera (1983)
- The Freshman (1990)
- Deep Impact (1998)
- House of the Sleeping Beauties (2006)
- The Brothers Bloom (2008)
