Nominated for ten Academy Awards - won five, including Best Picture, Director, Screenplay, Editing and Art Direction. MacLaine and Lemmon starred together again in "Irma la Duce" (1963). Playwright Neil Simon adapted the screenplay as the book for his musical "Promises, Promises." "The Apartment" was Billy Wilder's much-anticipated follow-up "Some Like It Hot."
Billy Wilder’s tragic-comedy stars Jack Lemmon as a struggling clerk in a huge New York insurance company. He has discovered a quick way to climb the corporate ladder — by lending out his apartment to executives as a place to take their mistresses. The plot thickens when he realizes that his married boss (Fred MacMurray) is using the apartment for trysts with building’s elevator operator (Shirley MacLaine).
Billy Wilder broke into films as a screenwriter in 1929, and wrote scripts for many German films until Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. He emigrated to Paris, then the US. His other screenwriting and directing credits include "Ninotchka" (1939), "The Lost Weekend" (1945) (Oscars for Best Picture, Director and Screenplay) and "Sunset Boulevard" (1950) (Oscar for Best Screenplay), "Double Indemnity" (1944), "Ace in the Hole" (1951), "Some Like It Hot" (1959) and "The Apartment" (1960).