NOTEWORTHY DEATH

Oscar winner for Judgment at Nuremberg

VIENNA - Austrian-born actor Maximilian Schell, who fled the Nazis as a child and later became a Hollywood favorite, has died. He was 83.

Schell’s agent, Patricia Baumbauer, said Saturday that he died overnight at a hospital in the Austrian city of Innsbruck after a “sudden illness.”

It was his second Hollywood role, as defense attorney Hans Rolfe in Stanley Kramer’s classic Judgment at Nuremberg, that earned him wide international acclaim. Schell’s impassioned but unsuccessful defense 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 program Playhouse 90.

Despite being typecast in 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.

Schell later worked as a producer and director.

Schell also was a highly successful concert pianist and conductor, performing with such luminaries as Claudio Abbado and Leonard Bernstein, and with orchestras in Berlin and Vienna.

The son of Swiss playwright Hermann Ferdinand Schell and Austrian stage actress Noe von Nordberg, Schell was born in Vienna on Dec. 8, 1930, and was raised in Switzerland after his family fled Germany’s annexation of his homeland.

Schell followed in the footsteps of his older sister Maria and brother Carl, making his stage debut in 1952. He then appeared in a number of German films before relocating to Hollywood in 1958.

Northwest Arkansas, Pages 10 on 02/02/2014

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