Gene Wilder

Actor Born: June 11, 1933; Died: August 28, 2016. GENE Wilder, who has died at the age of 83, was not only one of the great comedy actors of the late 20th century; he was also – for many people –the definitive Willy Wonka thanks to his unforgettable portrayal of the children’s literary character in the classic 1971 family movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

The sad-looking, blue-eyed blond with the frizzy hair and wistful air made his name in writer-director Mel Brooks’s raucous and inspired 1967 comedy The Producers. They were the perfect comedy match – the thoughtful, classically trained actor Wilder and the fast-talking wiseguy Brooks, whose exuberant personality was undoubtedly channelled through Zero Mostel’s portrayal of the unscrupulous Broadway producer who leads unassuming accountant Leo Bloom astray.

Wilder’s brilliantly unrestrained, and Oscar-nominated, performance as the meek and mild-mannered accountant who explodes out of his shell when he forms an unholy alliance with confidence-boosting con man Max Bialystock is the stuff of comedy legend.

His portrayal of Bloom’s hysterical emotional meltdown early in the film (“I’m wet. And I’m hysterical. I’m wet and I’m hysterical!”) – surely the most fantastic freak-out in cinema history – and his jubilant romp through the fountains of the Lincoln Center alone are enough to guarantee him a place as one of the great comedy neurotics, alongside Woody Allen and Bob Hope.

Speaking about the gentle actor’s comic appeal in parts such as the vulnerable Leo Bloom, Brooks once said: “One day God said, ‘Let there be prey,’ and he created pigeons, rabbits, lambs and Gene Wilder.” And in a tweet posted after hearing of Wilder’s death yester- day, Brooks described him as “one of the truly great talents of our time.”

Wilder and Brooks went on to work together in two classic spoofs, Blazing Saddles (1973) and Young Frankenstein (1974), for which Wilder contributed such key ideas as having the Frankenstein monster tap dance to Puttin’ On the Ritz. For that movie, he earned his Oscar nomination for the script, which he co-wrote with Brooks.

He went on to write and direct a handful of films himself, but with varying degrees of success; the best arguably being The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975).

In the mid-1970s, Wilder embarked on a fruitful collaboration with comedian Richard Pryor, which cast them as the sort of 1970s, interracial, version of the classic Bob Hope and Bing Crosby double-act. Their patchy run of high-octane buddy movies included two enduring favourites, Silver Streak (1976) and Stir Crazy (1980) but fizzled out in subsequent films, before both Wilder’s career and personal happiness faltered in the late 1980s.

Having met and fallen in love with the comedienne Gilda Radner while making Hanky Panky in 1982, Wilder lost her to ovarian cancer in 1989 – just five years into their marriage. The loss hit him hard, and he became a tireless campaigner for awareness of ovarian cancer, and opened a support centre, Gilda’s Club, for cancer patients and their families, in New York.

Gene Wilder was born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee in 1933. His father was a Russian-Jewish immigrant who ran a successful business importing and manufacturing novelties and souvenirs.

His American-born mother was of Polish descent and it was to cheer her up after she was left an invalid following a heart attack when young Jerome was just eight, that her son discovered his gift for comedy as he would improvise little sketches for her. By the age of 13, he had decided to become an actor. In 1955, having obtained an arts degree from the University of Iowa, Wilder moved to the UK, where he studied briefly at the Old Vic before winning a much coveted place in method teacher Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio in New York. He also served in the US Army, working in a military hospital psychiatric ward by day and attending drama classes at the weekends.

During this period, he adopted the stage name which he made famous. He later explained that he had taken Wilder from Thornton Wilder, the playwright who had penned his favourite play, Our Town. Gene, he said, came from the hero of Thomas Wolfe’s book Look the Homeward Angel.

Wilder made his off-Broadway debut in 1960 in Arnold Wesker’s Roots, and won the Clarence Derwent Award for promising newcomer in a supporting role for his next stage performance, in a star-studded Broadway production of Graham Greene’s comedy The Complaisant Lover.

He made his movie debut as the terrified undertaker kidnapped by the title characters in Bonnie and Clyde, in 1967, and was busy between Brooks films with a string of much less successful comedies and the occasional drama. One exception was his gently menacing turn as Willy Wonka in the movie of the Roald Dahl book; the other Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), the episodic 1972 Woody Allen film in which Wilder gave a masterclass in deadpan, playing a psychiatrist who is in love with a sheep.

Wilder joked to an interviewer that the part had been made easier because of “very attractive things about this sheep, the little black hairs around each eye”.

In 1996, he made his British stage debut in Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor and seven years later he won an Emmy award for his guest role in the TV sitcom Will & Grace. Thereafter, writing became his focus – he wrote three novels, a collection of stories, and a 2005 memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art.

Wilder was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1999, though by 2005 it was in remission. In recent years he suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. He is survived by his fourth wife, Karen Boyer, a speech therapist who had taught him to lip-read for his role as a deaf man in one of the later films with Pryor, See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989).