Maximilian Schell

Swiss and Austrian film and stage actor (1930–2014)

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Fame59.7
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Switzerland rank#104
Wikipedia33.7K

Lived 1930–2014, aged 84Switzerland

Switzerland ActorsActor

Wikipedia
73 languages
Cross-language footprint
Rank in Switzerland
#104
Actors
Era
1930–2014
Aged 84
Known for
Deep Impact
1998

Summary

Updated 2026-06-11

He won an Oscar for prosecuting Nazis on screen, then spent a career circling the wreckage of mid-century Europe—lawyer, resistor, emperor, father in an attic—always in the shadow of the war that drove his family out of Vienna when he was seven.

Biography

About

Born in Vienna in 1930 to parents in the arts, Maximilian Schell fled to Zürich with his family in 1938 after the Nazi annexation of Austria. He took up acting after the war and won the Academy Award for Best Actor in 1961 for playing a lawyer in Judgment at Nuremberg, then earned two more Oscar nominations for The Man in the Glass Booth and Julia. Fluent in English and German, he anchored films like Topkapi, The Odessa File, and A Bridge Too Far, and directed First Love in 1970. On television he won a Golden Globe for playing Stalin and portrayed Otto Frank, Peter the Great, and Frederick the…

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