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\u00a0(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.<\/p>\n
Billy Wilder was born on 22nd June 1906 in Sucha (today\u2019s 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 Krak\u00f3w and Lviv (then Lemberg, the capital of the crownland of Galicia). The Wilders were always on the move.<\/p>\n
\u2018These were not ordinary snack bars,\u2019 he told biographer Charlotte Chandler. Many of the stations resembled mini palaces, as if waiting to welcome an archduke. \u2018At important stops, a guy would ring a bell and announce, \u201cWe\u2019ll be here for one hour\u201d. 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.\u2019 Soon, Wilder senior was able to set his sights on a grander prize \u2013 a hotel in the heart of Krak\u00f3w.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Many of his first memories were coloured by irate waiters and the temptations of the hotel kitchen. It…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":24210,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1637,14836,14835,56,14837],"class_list":["post-24209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-krakow","tag-film","tag-film-director","tag-hollywood","tag-krakow","tag-polish-film-director"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24209\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/24210"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/poland\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}