Remembering a talented comedic actor and writer
Wilder was ‘one of the truly great talents of our time,’ Mel Brooks says
STAMFORD, CONN. Gene Wilder, the star of such comedy classics as Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles, has died. He was 83.
Wilder’s nephew said the actor and writer died Aug. 28 in Stamford, Conn., from complications from Alzheimer’s disease. He had also been diagnosed with nonHodgkin’s lymphoma in 1989.
Jordan Walker-Pearlman said Wilder was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s three years ago, but had kept the condition private so as not to disappoint fans.
“He simply couldn’t bear the idea of one less smile in the world,” Walker-Pearlman said.
Wilder started his acting career on the stage, but millions knew him from movies, especially his collaborations with Mel Brooks on The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein. That film was co-written by Brooks and Wilder.
“One of the truly great talents of our time,” Brooks tweeted. “He blessed every film we did with his magic & he blessed me with his friendship.”
With unkempt hair and big, buggy eyes, Wilder mastered playing panicked characters caught up in schemes that only a madman such as Brooks could devise, whether reviving a monster in Young Frankenstein or bilking Broadway in The Producers. Brooks would call him “God’s perfect prey, the victim in all of us.”
“My quiet exterior used to be a mask for hysteria,” Wilder told Time magazine in 1970. “After seven years of analysis, it just became a habit.”
But he also knew how to keep it cool as the boozy gunslinger in Blazing Saddles or the charming candy man in the children’s favourite Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.
He was close friends with Richard Pryor and their contrasting personas — Wilder uptight, Pryor loose — were ideal for comedy. They co-starred in four films: Silver Streak, Stir Crazy, See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Another You. And they created several memorable scenes, particularly when Pryor provided Wilder with directions on how to “act black” as they tried to avoid police in Silver Streak.
In 1968, Wilder received an Oscar nomination for his work in The Producers. He plays the introverted Leo Bloom, an accountant who discovers the liberating joys of greed and corruption as he and Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) conceive a Broadway flop titled Springtime For Hitler and plan to flee with the money raised for the show’s production.
Matthew Broderick played Wilder’s role in the 2001 Broadway stage revival of the show.
Though they collaborated on film, Wilder and Brooks had met through the theatre. Wilder was in a play with Brooks’ then-future wife, Anne Bancroft, who introduced the pair backstage in 1963.
Wilder was born Jerome Silberman on June 11, 1933, in Milwaukee, Wisc. His father was a Russian immigrant, his mother was of Polish descent. When he was six, Wilder’s mother suffered a heart attack that left her a semi-invalid. He soon began improvising comedy skits to entertain her, the first indication of his future career.
He started taking acting classes at 12 and continued performing and taking lessons through university. In 1961, Wilder became a member of Lee Strasberg ’s prestigious Actor’s Studio in Manhattan.
That same year, he made both his off-Broadway and Broadway debuts. He won the Clarence Derwent Award, given to promising newcomers, for the Broadway work in Graham Greene’s comedy The Complaisant Lover.
He used his new name, Gene Wilder, for the off-Broadway and Broadway roles. He lifted the first name from the character Eugene Gant in Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel, while the last name was clipped from playwright Thornton Wilder. A key break came when he co-starred with Bancroft in Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage, and met Brooks, her future husband.
“I was having trouble with one little section of the play, and he gave me tips on how to act. He said, ‘That’s a song and dance. He’s proselytizing about communism. Just skip over it, sing and dance over it, and get on to the good stuff.’ And he was right,” Wilder later said.
Before starring in The Producers, Wilder had a small role as the hostage of gangsters in the 1967 classic Bonnie and Clyde. He peaked in the mid-1970s with the twin Brooks hits Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein and in a dual role with Donald Sutherland in Start the Revolution Without Me.
Wilder is survived by his wife, Karen, whom he married in 1991.