Foiled by Cornel Wilde

Scratch beneath the surface of almost anybody in show business and you’ll usually find a more fascinating person than Hollywood presents. I’m assuming its because the town is focused on promoting the brands of studios and whatever vehicle they are flogging at the moment, but generally what gets lost in the shuffle are the amazing talents and skills and backgrounds of the artists, which are usually far more interesting than whatever dull tripe they were made to work on. Case in point, I had long written off Cornel Wilde (Kornél Lajos Weis, 1912-1989) as one of those Boring Years stiffs like Robert Taylor or Victor Mature. I knew him chiefly from things like the circus drama The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) in which his trapeze work is more impressive than the love triangle that’s supposed to constitute the plot. But Wilde himself proves interesting for all sorts of reasons. He had more technical street cred as a swashbuckler than Douglas Fairbanks or Errol Flynn. In later years he became jack-of-all-trades cinematic auteur as only a handful of his fellow studio actors, such as Orson Welles and Ida Lupino, managed to do. He wrote plays. He came close to earning a medical degree from Columbia. And, though you wouldn’t know it to hear him, English was his second language.

Wilde was a Hungarian Jew, born in a region that is now part of Slovakia. He was seven when he moved to the U.S. In his youth Wilde was a world class fencing master, winning championships with the New York Athletic Club, and for the Columbia team, eventually qualifying for the 1936 U.S. Olympic team, although he opted to focus on his acting career (his Broadway debut had been in 1933). He illustrated a 1936 fencing manual, and wrote a play with a fencing setting called Touché in 1937. His crowning achievement as both a Broadway actor and a fencing expert was Laurence Olivier’s 1940 production of Romeo and Juliet, in which Wilde played Tybalt, and choreographed the swordplay. This prepared him for future film roles like Robin Hood in The Bandit of Sherwood Forest(1945) and D’Artagnan Jr in At Sword’s Point (1952).

1937 was a big year for Wilde: he appeared in his longing running Broadway show Marc Connelly’sHaving Wonderful Time with John Garfield and Sheldon Leonard; he married model and actress Patricia Knight; and he began acting in films.

Wilde’s Oscar-nominated performance as Chopin in the ironically titled A Song to Remember (1945) is probably his most notable performance. 1945 was easily his peak Hollywood year, for he also starred in the noir classic Leave Her to Heaven and played Aladdin in A Thousand and One Nights.Two Flags West (1950) with Jeff Chandler was his best known western. The following year he divorced Knight and married actress Jean Wallace. Some of his well known later roles include The Comic (1969) with Dick Van Dyke, and The Fifth Musketeer (1979). He has about six dozen credits as a Hollywood actor total.

More interesting are the eight he produced and directed, often starring in and writing them as well. They were The Devil’s Hairpin (1957), about car racing; Maricaibo (1958), in which he portrays a fire-fighting frogman in Venezuela; Lancelot and Guinevere (1963); The Naked Prey (1965) in which he plays a man being hunted by African tribesmen; Beach Red (1967), a World War II film; No Blade of Grass (1970), a post-apocalyptic environmental disaster film; and Shark’s Treasure (1975), a Jaws knockoff.

In later years he appeared in shows like Fantasy Island and The Love Boat. His last appearance was a 1987 turn on Murder, She Wrote.