William Wellman, the Oscar-winning screenwriter-director of the original A Star Is Born (1937), was called “Wild Bill” during his World War I service as an aviator, a nickname that persisted in Hollywood due to his larger-than-life personality and lifestyle. A leap-year baby born in 1896 on the the 29th of February to a stockbroker father in Brookline, Massachusetts, Wellman was the great-great-great grandson of Francis Lewis, one of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence. His mother, the former Cecilia McCarthy, was born in Ireland. Despite an upper-middle class upbringing, the young Wellman was a hell-raiser. He excelled as an athlete and particularly enjoyed playing ice hockey, but he also enjoyed joy-riding in stolen cars at nights.

The young Bill Wellman was kicked out school at the age of 17 for hitting his high school principal on the head with a stink bomb. He tried making a living as a candy and a cotton salesman, but failed. He then worked for a lumber yard but was fired after losing control of a truck and driving it through the side of the barn. Eventually, he wound up playing professional ice hockey in Massachusetts and, as a young actor, while playing at the Colonial Theatre in Boston, an actor named Douglas Fairbanks took note of Wellman.

Impressed by his good looks and the figure he cut on ice, the soon-to-be silent-film superstar Fairbanks suggested to Wellman that he had what it took to become a movie actor. But Wellman’s youthful dream was to become an aviator, but since his father “didn’t have enough money for me to become a flier in the regular way…I went into a war to become a flier.”

When he was 19 years old, through the intercession of his uncle, Wellman joined the air wing of the French Foreign Legion, where he learned to fly. In France, Wellman served as a pilot with the famous Lafayette Flying Corps (better known as the Lafayette Escadrille), where he won his nickname “Wild Bill” due to his devil-may-care style in the air. In the spring of 1918, Wellman was recruited by the U.S. Army Air Corps, and was sent back to the States and stationed at Rockwell Field, in San Diego, California, to teach combat fighting tactics to the new AAC pilots.

During the weekends, Wellman would fly up to Hollywood and land on Douglas Fairbanks’ polo fields to spend the weekend. Fairbanks said that he would help the returning hero break into the movies when the war was over, and he was good to his word. Fairbanks envisioned Wellman as an actor and cast him as the juvenile in The Knickerbocker Buckaroo (1919) and as a young officer in Evangeline (1919), but acting was something Wellman grew to hate.  Disgusted with acting, Wellman told Fairbanks he wanted to be a director, and Fairbanks helped him into the production end of the business.

Goldwyn Pictures hired him as a messenger in 1920, and he soon worked his way up the ladder, first as an assistant cutter, then as an assistant property man, property man, assistant director and second unit director, before making his uncredited directorial debut later that year at Fox with The Twins of Suffering Creek (1920) (starring Dustin Farnum (the silent film B-Western star whom Dustin Hoffman’s star-struck mother named the future double-Oscar winner after).

Paramount paid Wellman $250 a week to direct Wings (1927). He also appeared one time as a stunt-pilot, flying one of the German planes that landed and rolled over. The production employed 3,500 soldiers, 65 pilots, and 165 airplanes. It took a year to film Wings (1927), but when it was released, it turned out to be one of the most financially successful silent pictures ever released and helped put Gary Cooper, whom Wellman personally cast in a small role, on the path to stardom. Wings (1927) was the first film to win an Academy Award for Best Picture.

The hard-drinking Wellman usually oversaw a riotous set, in line with his own life-style. He married five women, including a Zeigfeld Follies showgirl, before settling down with Dorothy Coonan Wellman, a former Busby Berkeley dancer. Wellman believed that his Dorothy saved him from becoming a caricature of himself.
She appeared as a tomboy in Wild Boys of the Road (1933) , a Depression Era social commentary picture made for the progressive Warner Bros. The film is a favorite of Martin Scorsese. It came two years after Wellman’s masterpiece of the era, The Public Enemy (1931) , one of the great early talkies, one of the great gangster pictures, and the film that made James Cagney a superstar. Scorsese says that Wellman’s use of music in the film influenced his own first gangster picture, Mean Streets (1973) .

Wellman was equally adept at comedy as he was with macho material, helming the original A Star Is Born (1937) (for which won his only Oscar, for best original story) and the biting satire Nothing Sacred (1937) — both of which starred Fredric March — for producer David O. Selznick. Both movies were dissections of the fame game, as was his satire Roxie Hart (1942), which reportedly was one of Stanley Kubrick’s favorite films.

During the World War Two, Wellman continued to make outstanding films, including The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) and Story of G.I. Joe (1945), as well as Battleground (1949) after the war. In the 1950s, Wellman’s best films starred John Wayne, including the influential aviation picture The High and the Mighty (1954) , for which he received his third and last best director Oscar nomination. His final film hearkened back to his World War One service, Lafayette Escadrille (1958), which featured the unit in which Wellman had flown. He retired as a director after making the film, reportedly enraged at Warner Bros.’s post-production tampering with a film that meant so much to him.

His complete filmography can be found here:  http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0920074/filmoyear