Maximilian Schell
Actor
- Born
- December 8, 1930 · Vienna, Austria
- Died
- February 1, 2014 (age 83)
Maximilian Schell (8 December 1930 – 1 February 2014) was a Swiss actor. 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 Zürich. After World War II ended, Schell took up acting and directing full-time.
Schell won the Academy Award for Best Actor for playing a lawyer in the legal drama Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). He was Oscar-nominated for playing a character with multiple identities in The Man in the Glass Booth (1975) and for playing a man resisting Nazism in Julia (1977). Fluent in both English and German, Schell earned top billing in a number of Nazi-era themed films. He acted in films such as Topkapi (1964), The Deadly Affair (1967), Counterpoint (1968), Simón Bolívar (1969), The Odessa File (1974), A Bridge Too Far (1977), and Deep Impact (1998).
Read moreShow less
On television, he received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for the NBC film Miss Rose White and the HBO television film Stalin (1992), the later of which earned him the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor – Series, Miniseries or Television Film. He also portrayed Otto Frank in the TV film The Diary of Anne Frank (1980), the Russian emperor Peter the Great in the NBC series Peter the Great (1986), Frederick the Great in the British series Young Catherine (1991), and Brother Jean le Maistre in the miniseries Joan of Arc (1999).
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.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Maximilian Schell, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Known for
Acting100
- 2015Les brigands as Mr. Escher
- 2011Jedermann Remixed as Jedermann (archive footage)
- 2010Maximilian Schell - Ein sehnsüchtiger Rebell as Self
- 2009Black Flowers as Jacob Krinsten
- 2009Darkness
- 2009The Brothers Bloom as Diamond Dog
- 2007The Shell Seekers as Lawrence Sterne
- 2007Die Rosenkönigin as Karl Friedrich Weidemann
- 2007Verstörung - und eine Art von Poesie. Die Filmlegende Bernhard Wicki as Himself
- 2006House of the Sleeping Beauties
