Cornel Wilde was a Hungarian-American actor and film director.
Background
Kornél Lajos Weisz was born in 1912 in Prievidza, Hungary (now Slovakia), although his year and place of birth are usually and inaccurately given as 1915 in New York City. His Hungarian Jewish parents were Vojtech Weisz (Americanized to Louis Bela Wilde) and Renée Mary Vid. He was named for his paternal grandfather, and upon arrival in the U.S. at age 7 in 1920, his name was Americanized to Cornelius Louis Wilde.
Education
He qualified for the United States fencing team prior to the 1936 Summer Olympic Games, but quit the team just prior to the games in order to take a role in the theater. In preparation for an acting career, he and his new wife Marjory Heinzen (later to be known as Patricia Knight) shaved years off their ages, three for him and five for her. As a result, most publicity records and subsequent sources wrongly indicate a 1915 birth for Wilde.
Career
The tall (6 foot 1 inch), muscular and dashing actor was often cast in routine swashbucklers and action melodramas. He was able to stretch his talent, however, in such roles as a paroled convict in ''Road House'' (1948), an embattled parole officer in ''Shockproof'' (1949), a dedicated policeman in ''The Big Combo'' (1955), a daring aerialist in ''The Greatest Show on Earth'' (1952), an ambitious executive in ''Woman's World'' (1954) and a heroic emperor in ''Constantine and the Cross'' (1961).
In 1955, Mr. Wilde formed his own company, Theodora Productions, and began directing, producing and starring in modest-budget movies shot overseas. These included ''The Naked Prey'' (1966), in which he was relentlessly hunted through a jungle, and ''Beach Red'' (1967), a passionately pacifist work. Reviewing the latter film, Howard Thompson of The New York Times credited Mr. Wilde with having ''nimbly piloted . . . a graphic, unflinching and honest drama of men in combat'' with ''simple, unrestrained and stinging honesty, semidocumentary vigor'' and ''crisp economy.''
Other Wilde productions included ''Storm Fear,'' ''The Devil's Hairpin,'' ''Maracaibo,'' ''Sword of Lancelot,'' ''No Blade of Grass'' and ''Shark's Treasure.'' The films met with mixed success and were praised by reviewers for having bold aspirations; but some reviewers said several of them were naive, simplistic and brutal. Traveled Widely in Europe
The actor and film maker was named Cornelius Louis Wilde at his birth on Oct. 13, 1915, in Manhattan. He spent much of his youth accompanying his father on business trips to Europe and became fluent in several languages. In New York he studied at Townsend Harris High School and City College while working as a Macy's toy salesman and commercial artist.
Mr. Wilde won a scholarship to the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University and was a leading member of the 1936 American Olympic fencing team, but he abandoned his ambitions to be a surgeon and a champion fencer to pursue an acting career. He gained his first major notice as Tybalt in the Laurence Olivier-Vivian Leigh production of ''Romeo and Juliet'' on Broadway in 1940.
That performance won him a Hollywood contract and the role of Chopin in ''A Song to Remember.'' The public flocked to buy recordings of works by the composer and to see the handsome actor who, in one vivid scene, coughed blood on the piano keys. The film also provided Merle Oberon (playing George Sand) with the celebrated advice to Chopin to ''discontinue that so-called Polonaise jumble you've been playing for days.''
The baroque script was criticized by most reviewers and prompted the critic James Agee to denounce the movie as ''infuriating and as funny a misrepresentation of an artist's life and work as I have ever seen.'' Criticism notwithstanding, Mr. Wilde was nominated for an Academy Award. Played D'Artagnan in 1979
Mr. Wilde's other films included ''A Thousand and One Nights'' (as Aladdin, in 1945), ''Leave Her to Heaven'' (1945), ''The Bandit of Sherwood Forest'' (as Robin Hood's son, in 1946), ''Centennial Summer'' (1946), ''Forever Amber'' (1947), ''Omar Khayyam'' (in the title role, in 1957) and ''The Fifth Musketeer'' (as D'Artagnan, in 1979).
Reviewing his deepest preoccupations in 1986, Mr. Wilde remarked: ''I am very concerned about the environment and psychological health of this beautiful planet. Throughout my work is the idea, over and over, that we must all learn to respect one another.''
The leading actress in many of Mr. Wilde's independent productions was Jean Wallace, whom he married in 1951. They divorced in 1981. They had a son, Cornel Wallace Wilde, of Beverly Hills, Calif. The film maker also had a daughter, Wendy, of Berkeley, Calif., by his first wife, the actress Patricia Knight, whom he married in 1937 and was divorced from in 1951. He is also survived by two stepsons, Pascal Franchot Tone of Hamilton, Mass., and Thomas Jefferson Tone of Ottawa, and three grandchildren.
He married the actress Patricia Knight in 1937. She appeared with him in Shockproof (1949). They had a daughter, Wendy (born February 22, 1943), and divorced in 1951.
He married the actress Jean Wallace in 1951. Wallace, formerly married to actor Franchot Tone, co-starred with Wilde in several films including The Big Combo (1955), Lancelot and Guinevere, aka Sword of Lancelot (1963), and Beach Red (1967). Her two children from her marriage to Franchot Tone became Wilde's stepsons. They also had a son together, Cornel Wallace Wilde Jr. (born December 19, 1967). They divorced in 1981.