Mr Wilder and Me
‘A love letter to the spirit of cinema’ Guardian
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The prize-winning, bestselling author of Middle England turns his gaze to one of cinema's most intriguing figures - famed director of Some Like It Hot, Billy Wilder.
***SOON TO BE A MAJOR FILM***
In the summer of 1977, naïve Calista Frangopoulou sets out to venture into the world. On a Greek island that has been turned into a film set, she finds herself working for Billy Wilder, about whom she knows almost nothing.
While Calista is thrilled with her new adventure, Wilder himself is living with the realisation that his star may be on the wane. Rebuffed by Hollywood, he has financed his film with German money, and when Calista follows him to Munich, she finds herself joining him on a journey of memory into the dark heart of his family history.
At once a tender coming-of-age story and an intimate portrait of a Hollywood icon, Mr Wilder and Me explores the nature of time and fame, of family and the treacherous lure of nostalgia . . .
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'Utterly charming, deeply poignant and ultimately uplifting' Mail on Sunday
'Sweeps beautifully from Hollywood to Greece and London' FT, Best Books of 2020
'The dialogue's sharp, the comic timing excellent' Sunday Times
Written with his signature wit, Jonathan Coe's unmissable new novel, Bournville, is available now!
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
English author Coe (Middle England) offers a witty elegy for the last gasp of old Hollywood. While backpacking across America in 1976, 21-year-old Greek musician Calista Frangopoulou has a chance encounter with real-life 70-year-old film director Billy Wilder at a Beverly Hills restaurant. So charmed is Wilder with Calista that he invites her to work as his interpreter on the production of his next movie, Fedora, on Corfu. After proving herself invaluable to the director, Calista travels with Wilder to Munich for further filming. There, Wilder, a Viennese Jew who fled Germany before WWII, is forced once again to confront his country's Nazi past. Meanwhile, Calista stumbles into a romance with a young English film student. A lengthy flashback to Wilder's life as a German émigré is affectingly rendered in screenplay format. Coe's fictionalized account of the real-life filming of Fedora—which Wilder's inability to finance in Hollywood his writing partner incisively attributes to the business's youth-obsessed preference for "kids with beards," such as Spielberg and Scorsese—is filled with hilarious anecdotes and some hard-won wisdom. As Wilder embarks on what will turn out to be his penultimate picture, Coe brings great sympathy to his touching depiction of an older artist fighting to remain relevant. Coe's fans will fall for this one.
