CORNEL WILDE GAINED PERSONAL TRIUMPH AS COMPOSER CHOPIN

Wanganui Chronicle, 17 January 1948, Page 8

CORNEL WILDE GAINED PERSONAL TRIUMPH AS COMPOSER CHOPIN

Cornel Wilde had played so manyheavy dramatic roles that folks around Hollywood began calling him “the moody Hungarian.” Everybody seemed to have forgotten that his first film was a rollicking comedy called “The Perfect Snob,” in whicn he was extremely funny. Everybody, that is, except producer director Don Hartman at Columbia. Hartman cast Wilde opposite Ginger Rogers in Columbia's romantic farce-comedy, “It Had To Be You,” and a number of people shook their heads dubiously. The doubters, however, were utterly confounded when Hartman’s film began x to unreel on the screen, showing Wilde as an authentic master of farce—a talent which most of Hollywood had never suspected. Wilde, prospective member of the 1936 United States Olympic Fencing Team, as intercollegiate American champion with the foils, sacrificed athletic fame to become an actor. He did not go to Europe to match steel with his teammates. Instead, he put up his swords to stay with the Theatre. His Broadway break came with the romantic lead in “Moon Over Mulberry Street.” Since then, however, he has never been far in mind and body from his prime diversion of swordsmanship, and has let it be known through Hollywood that he will pick up the foils on a moment’s notice, for some costume piece involving swordplay, such as “Forever Amber,” in which h»> has the male starring role. He had demonstrated his prowess on the screen when, fitted out in jerkin and breeches, he slashed his technicolour way through all enemies as Robin Hood’s son in Columbia’s “The Bandit of Sherwood Forest.” As Aladdin in “A Thousand and One

Nights,” he battled the Sultan and sundry palace guards. It was, however as the composer Frederic Chopin in Columbia’s “A Song To Remember,” and not as a swordsman, that ng first enjoyed a personal triumph. Born in New York City, Oct. 13, 1915, Cornel crossed the Atlantic a year later with his parents and an oidei sister, Edith. His father Louis L. Wilde, was a perfume and cosmetic importer in Manhattan until called home to Budapest to join his regiment. During the first World War the elder Wilde reported for duty as a captain in a cavalry unit. In the revolution which subsequently ravaged Hungary, Cornel remembers a harrowing ride in a horse-drawn cart, bound for a refuge in Budapest. Soon after the family returned to America. In 1931 they again returned to Europe, travelling through France and Czechoslovakia, and in Budapest Cornel entered an art school’ and took up the national sport of fencing. Back in New York he entered upon a career of medicine obtained a scholarship to th e College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, but gave this up for the Theatre. In 1937 he married the beautiful actress Patricia Knight, and they now have a lovely young daughter, Wendy. Before appearing in “A Song To Remember,” he appeared in many small productions but it was at Columbia that he gained recognition. From then on he was a star. After playing three successive leads for Columbia, he returned to Twentieth for “Leave Her To Heaven,” and “Forever Amber,” then back to Columbia for “It Had To Be You.” Cornel is six feet one inch tall, weighs 174 pounds and has brown hair and eyes.

A Floating Hotel. Negotiations are now being completed for the charter of a vessel in which to house 20 members of a British film unit, who will spend two months filming “The Blue Lagoon” in the Fiji Islands. Acting as a floating hotel, the ship will take Jean Simmons and the unit from Suva, Fijian capital, t° the “perfect tropical island”—one of the isolated Yasawa group, 200 miles to the northwest. Living conditions aboard the vessel will be as comfortable ‘as possible. Rations from Australia will be good—but there will be no luxury.