Wilde is also survived by two stepsons from Wallace’s marriage to the late Franchot Tone. They had a son and were divorced in 1980. They had a daughter and were divorced in 1951, and that same year he married Wallace. Wilde’s first wife was actress Patricia Knight, whom he married in 1938. On television, the seemingly ageless actor was featured in “Gargoyles” in 1972 and then went back to directing and/or writing for “Shark’s Treasure” and “The Fifth Musketeer.”Īt his death he was editing his autobiography, “My Very Wilde Life,” and was working on a sequel to “The Naked Prey.” If a brutal scene is shown for no reason except to shock, then it is bad.” “If you do not have conflict, you do not have drama. “You can’t get away from violence in drama,” was his reply. “Beach Red,” about an American landing on a Japanese-held island during World War II, was also criticized for violence and supposed degradation of women. “The Big Combo” (1955), a melodrama about syndicated crime that included some torture scenes, was criticized at the time for being too violent. Those independent efforts produced mixed reactions. It was filmed in South Africa while many other of the Theodora films were also made overseas on limited budgets. He formed, with his second wife actress Jean Wallace (they had performed together in “Star of India”), Theodora Productions, and in they 1955 produced “Storm Fear.” The other pictures he starred in, produced or directed included “The Big Combo,” “The Devil’s Hairpin,” “Maracaibo,” “Sword of Lancelot,” “Beach Red” and “The Naked Prey,” in which he spent most of the 94-minute film wearing a loincloth and brandishing a spear as savages pursued him as they would a lion.ĭespite the plot’s naivete, it was nominated for an Oscar for its script. Demille in 1952.īut the roles had taken on what seemed to Wilde to be a certain unsettling sameness, and he abandoned what was at the time a $150,000-a-picture career to become a writer-producer-director. 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. After 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.
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