While Billy Wilder's cynical films rarely idealize the United States, his own life story followed the narrative arc of an immigrant's American Dream. Born in Austria-Hungary in 1906, Wilder began his screenwriting career in Berlin before coming to Hollywood in 1933. He mastered English from movies, popular music, and baseball game broadcasts — all of which tuned his ear to the snappy patter of the American vernacular. Mentored by legendary director Ernst Lubitsch, Wilder co-wrote racy comedies like "Midnight" (1939), "Ninotchka" (also 1939), and "Ball of Fire" (1941). But he emerged as an auteur — and Hollywood's most deft and resourceful director, ever — in the 1940s and 1950s. His razor-keen "Double Indemnity" (1944) still sets the standard for film noir. Yet Wilder proved a versatile virtuoso at espionage thrillers (1943's "Five Graves to Cairo") and harrowing dramas (1946's "The Lost Weekend"), as well as unforgettable comedies, both light (1954's "Sabrina") and dark (1960's "The Apartment"). Regardless of genre, his films are always sharp, witty, and flawlessly constructed. He coaxed immortal performances from many muses, including Jack Lemmon, Audrey Hepburn, and Humphrey Bogart. But his most iconic collaboration was with the troubled-but-gifted Marilyn Monroe in beloved sex farces like "The Seven-Year Itch" (1955) and "Some Like It Hot" (1959). She made the filming of the latter movie difficult. As he put it: "We were in mid-flight, and realized we had a nut on the plane." But Wilder understood her magic better than anyone else. And beneath all their sophistication, his films can display a warm humanity. That's most evident in the last line of "Some Like It Hot": "Well, nobody's perfect" — a sentiment etched into Wilder's tombstone when he died in 2002. —Jeff Ousborne