Six-time Oscar winner Billy Wilder dies at 95

Billy Wilder, the puckish screenwriter and director who made Garbo laugh, Fred MacMurray a murderer and Jack Lemmon a drag queen, died late Wednesday at his Beverly Hills home.

Mr. Wilder, 95, had suffered for years from a variety of health problems, including cancer. He died of pneumonia.

"Billy Wilder became the premier director of films for many, many years," Dale Olson, a longtime Hollywood publicist, said. "He's the idol of almost every other director who's come along."

The six-time Oscar winner - who, into his 90s, traveled to his office almost daily - specialized in the sweet-and-sour scenario. Irreverence in the face of desperation is the mark of Wilder characters, who range from Ray Milland's alcoholic in The Lost Weekend (1945), to Shirley MacLaine's suicidal elevator operator in The Apartment (1960), to Walter Matthau's disreputable lawyer in The Fortune Cookie (1966). For Mr. Wilder, a happy ending was when one of his despondent figures found humor - serenity, even - in ordinary misery.

Mr. Wilder's motto - filched from George Bernard Shaw - was: "If you want to tell people the truth, better make them laugh or they'll kill you." From his earliest Hollywood screenplays, Midnight and Ninotchka (both 1939), to his great works as writer-director, Some Like It Hot (1959) and The Apartment, the irascible Mr. Wilder made people laugh and want to kill him. William Holden, star of the director's Stalag 17 and Sunset Boulevard, noted that Mr. Wilder had "a brain full of razor blades and a heart full of chutzpah."

Some Wilderisms:

"Why don't you get out of that wet coat and into a dry martini?" - Robert Benchley to Ginger Rogers in The Major and the Minor.

"I'd worship the ground you walk on if you lived in a better neighborhood." - Mr. Wilder to singer Audrey Young, his second wife, during their courtship.

"An actor enters through a door, you've got nothing. But if he enters through a window, you've got a situation." - Mr. Wilder, on a good scenario.

Samuel Wilder was born in 1906 in the village of Sucha, then in the Austro-Hungarian empire and now in Poland. He was Americanized before he ever set foot on these shores. His Viennese mother, Eugenia, whose hero was Buffalo Bill, gave him the nickname Billie.