Why everyone’s talking about... Willy Wonka

Hollywood is planning a new movie imagining the early life of Willy Wonka. So what do we know about the fictional eccentric chocolate magnate?

Creator Roald Dahl never gave him a back story, but described him as ‘the most amazing, the most fantastic, the most extraordinary chocolate maker the world has ever seen’ and ‘quick and sharp and full of life’. The inspiration for Wonka’s factory came from the Cardiff-born writer’s teenage years at Repton public school, where pupils were sent samples from Cadbury to test.

From this, Dahl imagined ‘an inventing room, a secret place where fullygrown men in white overalls spent all their time playing around with sticky boiling messes, sugar and chocs’.

In 1964 those ideas became Charlie And The Chocolate Factory (unexpected fact: Dahl originally wanted Charlie to be black, but his agent talked him out of it) and seven years later, a film.

With Gene Wilder’s memorable performance!

Yes, but Dahl hated the 1971 movie so much he disowned the film. He wanted

Spike Milligan to be Wonka, while fellow Goon Peter Sellers begged for the role. Others considered included Fred Astaire (dismissed as too old), Oliver! star Ron Moody (turned it down), and all six members of Monty Python, separately (not famous enough).

Wilder, above, signed up on condition they used his idea for Wonka’s entrance, in which he appears infirm, only to turn an apparent fall into a gymnastic tumble, so ‘from that time on, no one will know if I’m lying or telling the truth’.

What’s the film’s legacy?

Real- life Wonka bars. Quaker Oats bankrolled the $ 3 million budget in turn for the spin-off rights in the US.

Then there was the Johnny Depp 2005 remake…

Maybe the less said about that the better (and the recent furore over antisemitic comments made by Dahl).

But it gave Wonka a past: an overbearing dentist father who forbade him from eating sweets, until he discovered them one day and an obsession was born. Depp said his performance was based on his idea of a stoned President George W. Bush. And to come full circle, the young Wonka was played by Blair Dunlop, who is the son of Fairport Convention folk star Ashley Hitchings, and also an old boy of… Repton.