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The Most Famous

FILM DIRECTORS from Austria

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This page contains a list of the greatest Austrian Film Directors. The pantheon dataset contains 1,581 Film Directors, 21 of which were born in Austria. This makes Austria the birth place of the 18th most number of Film Directors behind China and Australia.

Top 10

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the top 10 most legendary Austrian Film Directors of all time. This list of famous Austrian Film Directors is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity. Visit the rankings page to view the entire list of Austrian Film Directors.

Photo of Fritz Lang

1. Fritz Lang (1890 - 1976)

With an HPI of 71.40, Fritz Lang is the most famous Austrian Film Director.  His biography has been translated into 62 different languages on wikipedia.

Friedrich Christian Anton Lang (German: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈkʁɪsti̯an ˈantɔn laŋ]; December 5, 1890 – August 2, 1976), better known as Fritz Lang ([fʁɪt͡s laŋ]), was an Austrian-US-German film director, screenwriter, and producer who worked in Germany and later the United States. One of the best-known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute. He has been cited as one of the most influential filmmakers of all time.Lang's most celebrated films include the groundbreaking futuristic science-fiction film Metropolis (1927) and the influential M (1931), a film noir precursor. His 1929 film Woman in the Moon showcased the use of a multi-stage rocket, and also pioneered the concept of a rocket launch pad (a rocket standing upright against a tall building before launch having been slowly rolled into place) and the rocket-launch countdown clock. His other major films include Dr. Mabuse the Gambler (1922), Die Nibelungen (1924), and after moving to Hollywood in 1934, Fury (1936), You Only Live Once (1937), Hangmen Also Die! (1943), The Woman in the Window (1944), Scarlet Street (1945) and The Big Heat (1953). He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1939.

Photo of Billy Wilder

2. Billy Wilder (1906 - 2002)

With an HPI of 71.23, Billy Wilder is the 2nd most famous Austrian Film Director.  His biography has been translated into 60 different languages.

Billy Wilder (; German: [ˈvɪldɐ]; born Samuel Wilder; June 22, 1906 – March 27, 2002) was an Austrian-born filmmaker and screenwriter. His career in Hollywood spanned five decades, and he is regarded as one of the most brilliant and versatile filmmakers of Classic Hollywood cinema. He received seven Academy Awards (among 21 nominations), a BAFTA Award, the Cannes Film Festival's Palme d'Or and two Golden Globe Awards. Wilder became a screenwriter while living in Berlin. The rise of the Nazi Party and antisemitism in Germany saw him move to Paris. He then moved to Hollywood in 1934, and had a major hit when he, Charles Brackett and Walter Reisch wrote the screenplay for the Academy Award-nominated film Ninotchka (1939). Wilder established his directorial reputation and received his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Director with the film noir Double Indemnity (1944), based on the novel by James M Cain with a screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler. Wilder won the Best Director and Best Screenplay Academy Awards for The Lost Weekend (1945), which also won the Academy Award for Best Picture.In the 1950s, Wilder directed and co-wrote a string of critically acclaimed films, including the Hollywood drama Sunset Boulevard (1950), for which he won his second screenplay Academy Award; Ace in the Hole (1951), Stalag 17 (1953) and Sabrina (1954). Wilder directed and co-wrote three films in 1957: The Spirit of St. Louis, Love in the Afternoon and Witness for the Prosecution. During this period, Wilder also directed Marilyn Monroe in two films, The Seven Year Itch (1955) and Some Like It Hot (1959). In 1960, Wilder co-wrote, directed and produced the critically acclaimed film The Apartment. It won Wilder Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay. Other notable films Wilder directed include One, Two, Three (1961), Irma la Douce (1963), Kiss Me, Stupid (1964), The Fortune Cookie (1966) and Avanti! (1972). Wilder received various honors for his distinguished career including the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1986, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1990, the National Medal of Arts in 1993 and the BAFTA Fellowship Award in 1995. He also received the Directors Guild of America's Lifetime Achievement Award, the Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement and the Producers Guild of America's Lifetime Achievement Award. Seven of his films are preserved in the United States National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant".

Photo of Erich von Stroheim

3. Erich von Stroheim (1885 - 1957)

With an HPI of 63.86, Erich von Stroheim is the 3rd most famous Austrian Film Director.  His biography has been translated into 49 different languages.

Erich Oswald Hans Carl Maria von Stroheim (born Erich Oswald Stroheim; September 22, 1885 – May 12, 1957) was an Austrian-American director, screenwriter, actor, and producer, most noted as a film star and avant-garde, visionary director of the silent era. His 1924 film Greed (an adaptation of Frank Norris's 1899 novel McTeague) is considered one of the finest and most important films ever made. After clashes with Hollywood studio bosses over budget and workers' rights problems, Stroheim found it difficult to find work as a director and subsequently became a well-respected character actor, particularly in French cinema. For his early innovations as a director, Stroheim is still celebrated as one of the first of the auteur directors. He helped introduce more sophisticated plots and noirish sexual and psychological undercurrents into cinema. He died of prostate cancer in France in 1957, at the age of 71. Beloved by Parisian neo-Surrealists known as Lettrists, he was honored by Lettrist Maurice Lemaître with a 70-minute 1979 film titled Erich von Stroheim.

Photo of Josef von Sternberg

4. Josef von Sternberg (1894 - 1969)

With an HPI of 62.38, Josef von Sternberg is the 4th most famous Austrian Film Director.  His biography has been translated into 37 different languages.

Josef von Sternberg (German: [ˈjoːzɛf fɔn ˈʃtɛʁnbɛʁk]; born Jonas Sternberg; May 29, 1894 – December 22, 1969) was an Austrian-born filmmaker whose career successfully spanned the transition from the silent to the sound era, during which he worked with most of the major Hollywood studios. He is best known for his film collaboration with actress Marlene Dietrich in the 1930s, including the highly regarded Paramount/UFA production, The Blue Angel (1930).Sternberg's finest works are noteworthy for their striking pictorial compositions, dense décor, chiaroscuro illumination, and relentless camera motion, endowing the scenes with emotional intensity. He is also credited with having initiated the gangster film genre with his silent era movie Underworld (1927). Sternberg's themes typically offer the spectacle of an individual's desperate struggle to maintain their personal integrity as they sacrifice themselves for lust or love.He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director for Morocco (1930) and Shanghai Express (1932).

Photo of Max Reinhardt

5. Max Reinhardt (1873 - 1943)

With an HPI of 61.79, Max Reinhardt is the 5th most famous Austrian Film Director.  His biography has been translated into 37 different languages.

Max Reinhardt (German: [maks ˈʁaɪnhaʁt]; born Maximilian Goldmann; 9 September 1873 – 30 October 1943) was an Austrian-born theatre and film director, intendant, and theatrical producer. With his radically innovative and avante garde stage productions, Reinhardt is regarded as one of the most prominent stage directors of the early 20th century. For example, Reinhardt's 1917 stage premiere of Reinhard Sorge's Kleist Prize-winning stage play Der Bettler almost single-handedly gave birth to Expressionism in the theatre and ultimately in motion pictures as well. In 1920, Reinhardt established the Salzburg Festival by directing an open air production of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's acclaimed adaptation of the Everyman Medieval mystery play in the square before the Cathedral with the Alps as a background. This remains an annual custom at the Salzburg Festival to this day. Toby Cole and Helen Krich Chinoy have dubbed Reinhardt, "one of the most picturesque actor-directors of modern times", and write that his eventual arrival in the United States as a refugee from the imminent Nazi takeover of Austria followed a long and distinguished career, "inspired by the example of social participation in the ancient Greek and Medieval theatres", of seeking, "to bridge the separation between actors and audiences".In 1935, Reinhardt directed his first and only motion picture in the United States through Warner Brothers, the Expressionist film adaptation of William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, starring Mickey Rooney, Olivia De Havilland, and James Cagney. The film was banned by the Ministry of Propaganda in an infamous example of censorship in Nazi Germany. This was due not only to Joseph Goebbels' belief that Expressionism was degenerate art, but even more so due to the Jewish ancestry of director Max Reinhardt, Classical music composer Felix Mendelsohn, and soundtrack arranger Erich Wolfgang Korngold; whose work was already banned by Goebbels as allegedly degenerate music.Reinhardt also founded the highly influential drama schools Hochschule für Schauspielkunst "Ernst Busch" in Berlin, Max Reinhardt Seminar, the Max Reinhardt Workshop (Sunset Boulevard), and the Max Reinhardt Junior Workshop. Even though Reinhardt did not live long enough to witness the end of Nazism in 1945, his formerly expropriated estate at Schloss Leopoldskron near Salzburg was restored to his widow and his legacy continues to be celebrated and honoured in the modern Germanosphere for his many radically innovative contributions to the performing arts.

Photo of Alexander Korda

6. Alexander Korda (1893 - 1956)

With an HPI of 55.74, Alexander Korda is the 6th most famous Austrian Film Director.  His biography has been translated into 34 different languages.

Sir Alexander Korda (; born Sándor László Kellner; Hungarian: Korda Sándor; 16 September 1893 – 23 January 1956) was a Hungarian–born British film director, producer, and screenwriter, who founded his own film production studios and film distribution company.Born in Hungary, where he began his career, he worked briefly in the Austrian and German film industries during the era of silent films, before being based in Hollywood from 1926 to 1930 for the first of his two brief periods there (the other was during World War II). The change led to a divorce from his first wife, the Hungarian film actress María Corda, who was unable to make the transition from silent films to "talkies" because of her Hungarian accent. From 1930, Korda was active in the British film industry, and soon became one of its leading figures. He was the founder of London Films and, post-war, the owner of British Lion Films, a film distribution company. Korda produced many outstanding classics of the British film industry, including The Private Life of Henry VIII, Rembrandt, Things To Come, The Thief of Baghdad and The Third Man. In 1942, Korda became the first filmmaker to receive a knighthood.

Photo of Ernst Marischka

7. Ernst Marischka (1893 - 1963)

With an HPI of 53.44, Ernst Marischka is the 7th most famous Austrian Film Director.  His biography has been translated into 20 different languages.

Ernst Marischka (2 January 1893 – 12 May 1963) was an Austrian screenwriter and film director. He wrote for more than 90 films between 1913 and 1962. He also directed 29 films between 1915 and 1962. He wrote and directed the Sissi trilogy - Sissi (1955), Sissi – The Young Empress (1956) and Sissi – Fateful Years of an Empress (1957). The films were based on the life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria. He was the brother of Hubert Marischka. He was named for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1946, for A Song to Remember (1945).

Photo of Gustav Ucicky

8. Gustav Ucicky (1899 - 1961)

With an HPI of 52.89, Gustav Ucicky is the 8th most famous Austrian Film Director.  His biography has been translated into 19 different languages.

Gustav Ucicky (6 July 1899 – 27 April 1961) was an Austrian film director, screenwriter, and cinematographer. He was one of the more successful directors in Austria and Germany from the 1930s through to the early 1960s. His work covered a wide variety of genres, but he is most acclaimed for his work in romantic drama and drama films.

Photo of Hans Hass

9. Hans Hass (1919 - 2013)

With an HPI of 50.57, Hans Hass is the 9th most famous Austrian Film Director.  His biography has been translated into 22 different languages.

Hans Hass (23 January 1919 – 16 June 2013) was an Austrian biologist and underwater diving pioneer. He was known mainly for being among the first scientists to popularise coral reefs, stingrays, octopuses and sharks. He pioneered the making of documentaries filmed underwater and led the development of a type of rebreather. He is also known for his energon theory and his commitment to protecting the environment.

Photo of Richard Oswald

10. Richard Oswald (1880 - 1963)

With an HPI of 50.51, Richard Oswald is the 10th most famous Austrian Film Director.  His biography has been translated into 21 different languages.

Richard Oswald (5 November 1880 – 11 September 1963) was an Austrian film director, producer, screenwriter, and father of German-American film director Gerd Oswald.

Pantheon has 21 people classified as film directors born between 1873 and 1977. Of these 21, 6 (28.57%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living film directors include Ulrich Seidl, Francis Lawrence, and Stefan Ruzowitzky. The most famous deceased film directors include Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, and Erich von Stroheim. As of April 2022, 2 new film directors have been added to Pantheon including Michael Glawogger and Hans Weingartner.

Living Film Directors

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Deceased Film Directors

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Newly Added Film Directors (2022)

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Which Film Directors were alive at the same time? This visualization shows the lifespans of the 15 most globally memorable Film Directors since 1700.