Because of Phillip Seymour Hoffman unfortunate demise , Oscar winner Maximilian Schell death on Feb. 1,2014 has been over shadowed.
Loved him in Judgement at Nuremberg (1961) and The Freshman (1990)
Great actor.
Even in a mess like Disney’s The Black Hole he made the crap material far better than it would have been.
It’s a shame that he didn’t get more work in his later years and that he spent so much of the end of life battling illness.
I got to meet him briefly in Berlin back during the film festival when his documentary about Marlene Dietrich was screened. (Marlene refused to go on camera, but did agree to an audio tape that was used with photos and such shown in the background as she spoke.)
Mr. Schell was a very kind and dignified man and just had “class”. I recently watched another documentary he did about his sister, Maria - a very famous actress.
RIP Max!
He won an Oscar for Judgment and got another nomination for Julia (losing to his fellow supporting nominee, Jason Robards). Interestingly, Vanessa Redgrave also won an Oscar for that film, and she had Schell played Tea Leoni’s parents in Deep Impact.
A class act, mostly notable in European productions, the first film I ever saw him in was Topkapi and always liked how comfortable and charismatic he was in front of the camera. RIP.
Long career with a wide range. We just re-watched The Freshman a couple weeks ago. In his scenes he just drew you into his weirdness.
“Carmine said one boy, here are two!”
His other Oscar-nominated role, in The Man In The Glass Booth, was also terrific, precisely because he wasn’t comfortable and charismatic in it. 
Is it wrong that I know him best for that version of Hamlet that was done on MST3K?
(I’d quote some of the riffs, but when I did that on a thread on the Outpost Gallifrey forum, I got chided for the tackiness of quoting MST3K in an obituary thread.)
I hope that he wouldn’t have minded that, for once, I laughed at Hamlet.
The only other thing I know him well for was The Black Hole, and that was only a rather vague memory…they showed it in our classroom when I was about eight, and admittedly at the time I had a hard time making head or tail of it. But his character stood out…a sort of thematic descendant of Captain Nemo. (And good LORD, was he handsome.)
RIP, Herr Schell. And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest.