Many of his first memories were coloured by irate waiters and the temptations of the hotel kitchen. It was a world that he tapped into throughout his Hollywood career, from his first hit as a screenwriter, Ninotchka (1939), through many of his films as director: Five Graves to Cairo (1943), Love in the Afternoon (1957) Some Like it Hot (1959), Irma la Douce (1963) and Avanti (1972). The hotel was a kind of home from home, a vein of comic gold that kept on giving.
Billy Wilder was born on 22nd June 1906 in Sucha (today’s Sucha Beskidzka, Poland) a small town in the Carpathian foothills, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Still, he might just have easily emerged at another stop down the line. His father, Max, ran a chain of restaurants on the railway that linked Vienna with Kraków and Lviv (then Lemberg, the capital of the crownland of Galicia). The Wilders were always on the move.
‘These were not ordinary snack bars,’ he told biographer Charlotte Chandler. Many of the stations resembled mini palaces, as if waiting to welcome an archduke. ‘At important stops, a guy would ring a bell and announce, “We’ll be here for one hour”. It was a hungry, captive audience. They would rush for the printed menu. They expected the service to be fast but good. My father, who had been a successful headwaiter, understood exactly how to please them.’ Soon, Wilder senior was able to set his sights on a grander prize – a hotel in the heart of Kraków.