Oscar-winning Austrian actor Maximilian Schell dies aged 83
Actor, writer, director, producer, conductor and concert pianist, Maximilian Schell leaves a legacy of oustanding perfromances in films and on stage
Austrian-born actor Maximilian Schell, a fugitive from Nazi Germany who became a Hollywood favourite and won an Oscar for his role as a defence attorney in Judgment at Nuremberg, has died. He was 83.
Schell’s agent, Patricia Baumbauer, said on Saturday he died overnight at a hospital in the Austrian city of Innsbruck following a “sudden illness”.
It was only his second Hollywood role, as defence attorney Hans Rolfe in Stanley Kramer’s classic Judgment at Nuremberg, that earned him wide international acclaim. Schell’s impassioned but unsuccessful defence of four Nazi judges on trial for sentencing innocent victims to death won him the 1961 Academy Award for best actor. Schell had first played Rolfe in a 1959 episode of the television programme Playhouse 90.
Despite being type-cast for numerous Nazi-era films, Schell’s acting performances in the mid-1970s also won him renewed popular acclaim, earning him a best actor Oscar nomination for The Man in the Glass Booth and a supporting actor nomination for his performance alongside Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave and Jason Robards in Julia.
Austrian Cabinet minister Josef Ostermayer described Schell as one of “the greatest actors in the German-speaking world,” the Austria Press Agency reported.
The son of Swiss playwright Hermann Ferdinand Schell and Austrian stage actress Noe von Nordberg, Schell was born in Vienna on December 8, 1930 and raised in Switzerland after his family fled Germany’s annexation of his homeland.