Maximilian Schell

 Maximilian Schell (December 8, 1930 – February 1, 2014)

Schell was a film and stage actor, who also wrote, directed and produced some of his own films. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the 1961 American film Judgment at Nuremberg, his second acting role in Hollywood. Born in Austria, his parents were involved in the arts and he grew up surrounded by acting and literature. While he was a child, his family fled to Switzerland in 1938 when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, and they settled in Zurich. After World War II ended, Schell took up acting or directing full-time. He appeared in numerous German films, often anti-war, before moving on to Hollywood. 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 (1968), The Odessa File (1974), The Man in the Glass Booth (1975), A Bridge Too Far (1977), Cross of Iron (1977) and Julia (1977). For his role as Vladimir Lenin in the television film Stalin (1992) he won the Golden Globe Award. Schell was a guest professor at the University of Southern California and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago. In 1985 he met the Russian actress Natalya Andrejchenko, whom he married in June 1986; their daughter Nastassja was born in 1989. The couple divorced in 2005, and Schell remarried in 2013. He died at age 83 on February 1, 2014, in Innsbruck, Austria, after a "sudden and serious illness".