Cornel Wilde was an ideal romantic lead of the 1940s, with virile good looks, a buff physique, a certain smoldering intensity -- and yet enough restraint to keep him from being overly dominant opposite some of the more glamorous female stars of the day. Adept at swashbuckling and convincing in crime melodramas, he eventually turned to producing and directing his own vehicles and earned particular critical praise for the originality and power of the jungle adventure The Naked Prey (1966) and the war film Beach Red (1967). He also wrote screenplays (sometimes under the pseudonym Jefferson Pascal) and occasionally created songs for the soundtracks of his movies.

Cornelius Louis Wilde was born in 1912 of Czech-Hungarian heritage in Prievidza, Hungary (now Slovakia). Growing up in Europe and New York City, he developed a sophisticated air and a facility with language. After graduating from a New York high school for gifted students, he attended the City College of New York. He won a medical scholarship to Columbia University and became a champion fencer, but abandoned both pursuits when the theater beckoned. His breakthrough was serving as fencing choreographer and playing the role of Tybalt in Laurence Olivier's 1940 Broadway production of Romeo and Juliet. That led to offers from Hollywood, where Wilde played a few minor roles before being cast as the elegant, suffering Frederic Chopin in Columbia Pictures' A Song to Remember (1945), for which he won his only Oscar® nomination, as Best Actor.

Also at Columbia, Wilde established his swashbuckling persona by playing Aladdin in A Thousand and One Nights (1945) and Robin Hood in The Bandit of Sherwood Forest (1946). He switched to 20th Century Fox beginning with Leave Her to Heaven (1945), John M. Stahl's colorful adaptation of the Ben Ames Williams novel with Gene Tierney as the jealous bride obsessed by her husband (Wilde) to the exclusion of all else. Now a hot property, he became one of Fox's most in-demand leading men, romancing Jeanne Crain in Centennial Summer (1946), Maureen O'Hara in The Homestretch (1947), Linda Darnell in Forever Amber (1947) and Ida Lupino in Road House (1948).

In the early 1950s Wilde enjoyed a showy role as a cocky French trapeze artist in Cecil B. DeMille's Oscar®-winning circus epic The Greatest Show on Earth (1952); was part of another all-star ensemble in the big-business comedy Woman's World (1954); showed off his fencing skills as the son of D'Artagnan in At Sword's Point (1952); and starred in a stylish film noir, The Big Combo (1955) opposite Jean Wallace, his second wife (the first was actress Patricia Knight). However, by the end of the decade good parts were becoming scarce, which may have been part of his motivation to begin directing his own projects. The first of these was Storm Fear (1955), a suspense drama with a Horton Foote screenplay that also featured Wallace.

In The Naked Prey Wilde plays a character called simply "The Man" who is hunted like a wild animal by vengeful African tribesmen. His direction of the film is pure and swift, with an emphasis on visual storytelling that makes it quite riveting. The screenplay by Clint Johnston and Don Peters, featuring little actual dialogue, was nominated for an Oscar®. Beach Red, set on a Japanese-held island stormed by American troops during World War II, features harrowingly realistic battle scenes that seem to prefigure such war epics as Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line and Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, both released in 1998.

The last of Wilde's 50-odd feature-film appearances came in The Fifth Musketeer (1979), in which he played an aging D'Artagnan; and Flesh and Bullets (1985), a crime drama in which his role was very brief. He also had amassed many TV credits before his death from leukemia in 1989. He had a daughter with his first wife and a son with his second.

by Roger Fristoe