Maximilian Schell

Maximilian Schell 8 December 1930 1 February 2014 was a Swiss actor Born in Austria his parents were involved in the arts and he grew up surrounded by performance and literature While he was still a child his family fled to Switzerland in 1938 when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany and they settled in Zürich After World War II ended Schell took up acting and directing fulltime Schell won the Academy Award for Best Actor for playing a lawyer in the legal drama Judgment at Nuremberg 1961 He was Oscarnominated for playing a character with multiple identities in The Man in the Glass Booth 1975 and for playing a man resisting Nazism in Julia 1977 Fluent in both English and German Schell earned top billing in a number of Naziera themed films He acted in films such as Topkapi 1964 The Deadly Affair 1967 Counterpoint 1968 Simón Bolívar 1969 The Odessa File 1974 A Bridge Too Far 1977 and Deep Impact 1998 On television he received two Primetime Emmy Award nominations for the NBC film Miss Rose White and the HBO television film Stalin 1992 the later of which earned him the Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor Series Miniseries or Television Film He also portrayed Otto Frank in the TV film The Diary of Anne Frank 1980 the Russian emperor Peter the Great in the NBC series Peter the Great 1986 Frederick the Great in the British series Young Catherine 1991 and Brother Jean le Maistre in the miniseries Joan of Arc 1999 Schell also performed in a number of stage plays including a celebrated performance as Prince Hamlet Schell was an accomplished pianist and conductor performing with Claudio Abbado and Leonard Bernstein and with orchestras in Berlin and Vienna His elder sister was the internationally noted actress Maria Schell he produced the documentary tribute My Sister Maria in 2002 Description above from the Wikipedia article Maximilian Schell licensed under CCBYSA full list of contributors on Wikipedia