Maximilian Schell
Maximilian Schell was a Swiss actor, theatre director, filmmaker, and musician of Austrian origin. He was one of the most internationally-acclaimed German-speaking actors of his generation, earning accolades for his work on both screen and stage. Born and initially raised in Vienna, where his parents were involved in the arts, 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 the Second World War, 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. He was Oscar-nominated for playing a character with multiple identities in The Man in the Glass Booth and for playing a man resisting Nazism in Julia. 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, The Deadly Affair, Counterpoint, Simón Bolívar, The Odessa File, A Bridge Too Far, and Deep Impact. He made his film directorial debut with the period romantic drama First Love, and would be nominated for the German Film Award for Best Director three times.
On television, he received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for the NBC film Miss Rose White and the HBO television film Stalin, 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, the Russian emperor Peter the Great in the NBC series Peter the Great, Frederick the Great in the British series Young Catherine, and Brother Jean le Maistre in the miniseries Joan of Arc.
Schell also performed in a number of stage plays, including a celebrated performance as Prince Hamlet, and was a director of stage plays and operas. He was an accomplished pianist and conductor, performing with Claudio Abbado and Leonard Bernstein, and with orchestras in Berlin and Vienna. The Deutsches Filminstitut called him "a universal artist." His elder sister was actress Maria Schell; he directed the documentary tribute My Sister Maria in 2002.
Early life and education
Schell was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of Margarethe, an actress who ran an acting school, and Hermann Ferdinand Schell, a Swiss poet, novelist, playwright, and pharmacy owner. Though later in his career he would play several Jewish characters, his parents were both Roman Catholic, and Schell stated he had no known Jewish ancestry. His elder sister Maria Schell was also an actress, as were their siblings, Carl and Immaculata "Immy" Schell.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:
The Schell family fled from Vienna in 1938 to get "away from Hitler" after the Anschluss, when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany. They resettled in Zürich, Switzerland.
In Zürich, Schell "grew up reading the classics" and, when he was ten, wrote his first play. Schell recalls that as a child, growing up surrounded by the theatre, he took acting for granted and did not want to become an actor at first: "What I wanted was to become a painter, a musician, or a playwright," like his father.
Schell later attended the University of Zurich for a year, where he also played association football and was on the rowing team, along with writing for newspapers as a part-time journalist for income. Following the end of World War II, he moved to Germany where he enrolled in the University of Munich and studied philosophy and art history. During breaks, he would sometimes return home to Zürich or stay at his family's farm in the country so he could write in seclusion:
Schell then returned to Zürich, where he served in the Swiss Army for a year, after which he attended the sixth form of University College School, London, for one year before re-entering the University of Zurich for another year, and later, the University of Basel for six months. During that period, he acted professionally in small parts, in both classical and modern plays, and decided that he would from then on devote his life to acting rather than pursue academic studies:
Schell began acting at the Basel Theatre.
Career
1955–1959: Early work and theater roles
Schell's film debut was in the German anti-war film Kinder, Mütter und ein General. It was the story of five mothers who confronted a German general at the front line, after learning that their sons, some as young as 15, had been "slated to be cannon fodder on behalf of the Third Reich." The film co-starred Klaus Kinski as an officer, with Schell playing the part of an officer-deserter. The story, which according to one critic, "depicts the insanity of continuing to fight a war that is lost," would become a "trademark" for many of Schell's future roles: "Schell's sensitivity in his portrayal of a young deserter disillusioned with fighting became a trademark of his acting."Schell subsequently acted in seven more films made in Europe before going to the U.S. Among those was The Plot to Assassinate Hitler. Later in the same year he had a supporting role in Jackboot Mutiny, in which he plays "a sensitive philosopher", who uses ethics to privately debate the arguments for assassinating Hitler.
In 1958 Schell was invited to the United States to act in the Broadway play, "Interlock" by Ira Levin, in which Schell played the role of an aspiring concert pianist. He made his Hollywood debut in the World War II film, The Young Lions, as the commanding German officer in another anti-war story, with Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift. German film historian Robert C. Reimer writes that the film, directed by Edward Dmytryk, again drew on Schell's German characterisation to "portray young officers disillusioned with a war that no longer made sense."
In 1960, Schell returned to Germany and played the title role in William Shakespeare's Hamlet for German TV, a role that he would play on two more occasions in live theatre productions during his career. Along with Laurence Olivier, Schell is considered "one of the greatest Hamlets ever," according to one writer. Schell recalled that when he played Hamlet for the first time, "it was like falling in love with a woman. ... not until I acted the part of Hamlet did I have a moment when I knew I was in love with acting." Schell's performance of Hamlet was featured as one of the last episodes of the American comedy series Mystery Science Theater 3000 in 1999.
1960–1979: Breakthrough and acclaim
In 1959, Schell acted in the role of a defence attorney on a live TV production, Judgment at Nuremberg, a fictionalized re-creation of the Nuremberg War Trials, in an edition of Playhouse 90. His performance in the TV drama was considered so good that he and Werner Klemperer were among the only members of the original cast selected to play the same parts in the 1961 film version. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor, which was the first win for a German-speaking actor since World War II. After winning the New York Film Critics award for his role, Schell recalled the pride he felt upon receiving a letter from his older sister Maria Schell, who was already an award-winning actress, "I received the most wonderful letter from Maria. She wrote, 'Now, when you have my letter in your hand, a beautiful day is coming for you. I will be with you, proud, because I knew such recognition would come one day, leading to something even greater and better ... not only because you are close to me but because I count you among the truly great actors, and it is wonderful that besides that you are my brother.' Maria and I are very close".According to Reimer, Schell gave a "bravura performance," where he tried to defend his clients, Nazi judges, "by arguing that all Germans share a collective guilt" for what happened. Biographer James Curtis notes that Schell prepared for his part in the movie by "reading the entire forty-volume record of the Nuremberg trials." Author Barry Monush describes the impact of Schell's acting, "Again, on the big screen, he was nothing short of electrifying as the counselor whose determination to place the blame for the Holocaust on anyone else but his clients, and brings morality into question".
Producer-director Stanley Kramer assembled a star-studded ensemble cast which included Spencer Tracy and Burt Lancaster. They "worked for nominal wages out of a desire to see the film made and for the opportunity to appear in it," notes film historian George McManus. Actor William Shatner remembers that, prior to the actual filming, "we understood the importance of the film we were making." It was nominated for eleven Academy Awards, winning two. In 2011, Schell appeared at a 50th anniversary tribute to the film and his Oscar win, held in Los Angeles at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where he spoke about his career and the film.
Beginning in 1968 Schell began writing, producing, directing and acting in a number of his own films: Among those were The Castle, a German film based on the novel by Franz Kafka, about a man trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare. Soon after he made Erste Liebe , based on a novel by Ivan Turgenev. The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
Schell's next film, The Pedestrian, is about a German tycoon "haunted by his Nazi past". In this film, notes one critic, "Schell probes the conscience and guilt in terms of the individual and of society, reaching to the universal heart of responsibility and moral inertia." It was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar and was a "great and commercial success in Germany," notes Roger Ebert.
Schell then produced, directed, and acted as a supporting character in End of the Game, a German crime thriller starring Jon Voight and Jacqueline Bisset. A few years later he co-wrote and directed the Austrian film Tales from the Vienna Woods. He had previously directed a stage production of the original play of that name by Ödön von Horváth at the National Theatre in London.
During his career, as one of the few German-speaking actors working in English-language films, Schell was top billed in a number of Nazi-era themed films, including Counterpoint, The Odessa File '', The Man in the Glass Booth, A Bridge Too Far, Cross of Iron and Julia. For the latter film, directed by Fred Zinnemann, Schell was again nominated for an Oscar for his supporting role as an anti-Nazi activist.
In a number of films Schell played the role of a Jewish character: as Otto Frank, Anne Frank's father, in The Diary of Anne Frank ; as the modern Zionist father in The Chosen ; in 1996, he played an Auschwitz survivor in Through Roses, a German film, written and directed by Jürgen Flimm; and in Left Luggage he played the father of a Jewish family.
In The Man in the Glass Booth, adapted from the stage play by Robert Shaw, Schell played both a Nazi officer and a Jewish Holocaust survivor, in a character with a double identity. Roger Ebert describes the main character, Albert Goldman, as "mad, and immensely complicated, and he is hidden in a maze of identities so thick that no one knows for sure who he really is." Schell, who at that period in his career saw himself primarily as a director, felt compelled to accept the part when it was offered to him:
Schell's acting in the film has been compared favorably to his other leading roles, with film historian Annette Insdorf writing, "Maximilian Schell is even more compelling as the quick-tempered, quicksilver Goldman than in his previous Holocaust-related roles, including Judgment at Nuremberg and The Condemned of Altona". She gives a number of examples of Schell's acting intensity, including the courtroom scenes, where Schell's character, after supposedly being exposed as a German officer, "attacks Jewish meekness" in his defense, and "boasts that the Jews were sheep who didn't believe what was happening." The film eventually suggests that Schell's character is in fact a Jew, but one whose sanity has been compromised by "survivor guilt." Schell was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor and the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor for his performance. To avoid being typecast, Schell also played more diverse characters in numerous films throughout his career: he played a museum treasure thief in Topkapi ; the eponymous Venezuelan revolutionary in Simón Bolívar ; a 19th-century ship captain in Krakatoa, East of Java ; a Captain Nemo-esque scientist/starship commander in the science fiction film, The Black Hole''.