Cornel Wilde

Cornel Wilde (October 13, 1912 – October 16, 1989)

He made his Broadway debut in 1935 in Moon Over Mulberry Street. Wilde also wrote a fencing play, Touché, under the pseudonym Clark Wales in 1937. Wilde was hired as a fencing teacher by Laurence Olivier for his 1940 Broadway production of Romeo and Juliet and was given the role of Tybalt in the production. His performance in this role netted him a Hollywood film contract. He had several small film roles until he played the role of Frédéric Chopin in 1945's A Song to Remember, for which he was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor. In 1945 he also starred in A Thousand and One Nights with Evelyn Keyes. He spent the rest of the decade appearing in romantic and swashbuckling films, but he also appeared in some significant films noirs, opposite Gene Tierney in Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Road House (1948) and Shockproof (1949), the latter film also starring his then-wife Patricia Knight. In the 1950s, Wilde created his own film production company that was named after Theodora Irvine and produced the film noir The Big Combo (1955). Wilde played the male lead alongside his second wife Jean Wallace. That same year, he appeared as himself in an episode of I Love Lucy, and on an episode of Father Knows Best in 1957. During the early 1970s, Wilde took a break from motion pictures and theater to turn toward television. He appeared as an unethical surgeon in the 1971 Night Gallery episode "Deliveries in the Rear" and portrayed an anthropologist in the 1972 TV movie Gargoyles. Cornel Wilde died of leukemia a few days after his 77th birthday in 1989, and is buried at Westwood Memorial Park.