page_title: Maximilian Schell
section_title: Character actor
hierarchical_section_title: Maximilian Schell / Career / Character actor
caption_attribution_description: English: Austrian actor Maximilian Schell
context_page_description: Maximilian Schell was an Austrian-born Swiss film and stage actor, who also wrote, directed and produced some of his own films. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the 1961 American film Judgment at Nuremberg, his second acting role in Hollywood. Born in Austria, his parents were involved in the arts and he grew up surrounded by acting and literature. While he was a child, his family fled to Switzerland in 1938 when Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, and they settled in Zurich. After World War II ended, Schell took up acting or directing full-time. He appeared in numerous German films, often anti-war, before moving on to Hollywood.
  Schell was top billed in a number of Nazi-era themed films, as he could speak both English and German. Among those were two films for which he received Oscar nominations: The Man in the Glass Booth, where he played a character with two identities, and Julia, where he helps the underground in Nazi Germany.
  His range of acting went beyond German characters, however; and during his career, he also played personalities as diverse as Venezuelan leader Simón Bolívar, Russian emperor Peter the Great, and physicist Albert Einstein.
context_section_description: To avoid being typecast, Schell also played more diverse characters in numerous films throughout his career: he played a museum treasure thief in Topkapi (1964); a Venezuelan leader  in Simón Bolívar (1969); a 19th-century ship captain in  Krakatoa, East of Java (1969); a Captain Nemo-esque scientist/starship commander in the science fiction film,  The Black Hole (1979); the Russian emperor in the television miniseries, Peter the Great (1986), opposite Laurence Olivier, Vanessa Redgrave and Trevor Howard, which won an Emmy Award; a comedy role with Marlon Brando in The Freshman (1990); Reese Witherspoon's surrogate grandfather in A Far Off Place; a treacherous Cardinal in  John Carpenter's Vampires (1998); as Frederick the Great in a TV film, Young Catherine (1991); as Vladimir Lenin in the TV series, Stalin (1992), for which he won the Golden Globe Award; a Russian KGB colonel in Candles in the Dark (1993); the Pharaoh in Abraham (1994); and Tea Leoni's father in the science fiction thriller, Deep Impact (1998).
  From the 1990s until late in his career, Schell appeared in many German-language made-for-TV films, such as the 2003 film Alles Glück dieser Erde (All the Luck in the World) opposite Uschi Glas and in the television miniseries Die Rückkehr des Tanzlehrers (2004), which was based on Henning Mankell's novel The Return of the Dancing Master. In 2006 he appeared in the stage play of Arthur Miller's Resurrection Blues, directed by Robert Altman, which played in London at the Old Vic. In 2007, he played the role of Albert Einstein on the German television series Giganten (Giants), which enacted the lives of people important in German history.
caption: Schell in 2006
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