page_title: Maximilian Schell
section_title: Personal life
hierarchical_section_title: Maximilian Schell / Personal life
caption_attribution_description: English: Publicity photo of Leonard Bernstein and Maximilian Schell for TV series, Bernstein/Beethoven.
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: During the 1960s Schell had a three-year-long affair with Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary, former wife of the last Shah of Iran. He also was rumored to have been engaged to the first African American Supermodel Donyale Luna in the mid 1960s. In 1985 he met the Russian actress Natalya Andrejchenko, whom he married in June 1986; their daughter Nastassja was born in 1989. After 2002, separated from his wife (whom he divorced in 2005), Schell had a relationship with the Austrian art historian Elisabeth Michitsch. From 2008 he was romantically involved with German opera singer Iva Mihanovic; they eventually married on 20 August 2013.
  Schell was a semi-professional pianist for much of his life. He had a piano when he lived in Munich and said that he would play for hours at a time for his own pleasure and to help him relax: "I find I need to rest. An actor must have pauses in between work, to renew himself, to read, to walk, to chop wood."
  Conductor Leonard Bernstein claimed that Schell was a "remarkably good pianist." In 1982, on a program filmed for the U.S. television network PBS, before Bernstein conducted the Vienna Philharmonic playing Beethoven symphonies, Schell read from Beethoven's letters to the audience. In 1983, he and Bernstein co-hosted an 11-part TV series, Bernstein/Beethoven, featuring nine live symphonies, along with discussions between Bernstein and Schell about Beethoven's works.
  On other occasions, Schell worked with Italian conductor Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic, which included a performance in Chicago of Igor Stravinsky's Oedipus Rex, and another in Jerusalem, of Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw. Schell also produced and directed a number of live operas, including Richard Wagner's Lohengrin for the Los Angeles Opera. He worked on the film project Beethoven's Fidelio, with Plácido Domingo and Kent Nagano.
  Schell was a guest professor at the University of Southern California and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate from Spertus Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership in Chicago.
caption: Leonard Bernstein and Schell during a TV series in 1983
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