George Sanders may not have been entirely serious when he said in his autobiography that he had confused W. Lee Wilder with his more famous brother Billy Wilder, but it is true that W. Lee Wilder only got into the movie business (in middle age) because he wanted to emulate his younger brother's success and he seems to have deliberately called himself "W. Lee" rather than Wilhelm, and encouraged people to call him "Willy", because he hoped to be linked with him. Billy Wilder took a dim view of this and took care to separate himself from his brother's movie activities, which were confined to B-movies and cheap exploitation pictures. On the rare occasions when he mentioned him to interviewers, he was extremely disparaging, and they were long estranged.
