Troubled actor who found fame with The Producers
Gene Wilder 1933-2016
With his shock of curly hair, mischievous smile and large, twinkling blue eyes, Gene Wilder was one of the most recognisable actors in Hollywood, said The Independent. He made his name in The Producers, but is perhaps best remembered for his performance as Willy Wonka in the first film version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (made in 1971, just seven years after the book’s publication). Dressed in a brown top hat and purple frock coat, he captured both Wonka’s whimsical charm and his moral ambiguity. He himself dictated how the character should make his entrance. Wonka, he told the director, would emerge from his factory gates, limp towards the waiting crowd with a cane, then fall forward – before effecting a perfect somersault and bouncing back up. When asked why, he replied: “Because from that time on, no one will know if I am lying or telling the truth.”
Jerome Silberman was born in Milwaukee in 1933. His father was a Russian immigrant who made a living importing souvenirs; his mother, who was of Polish descent, suffered a heart attack when he was six, which left her in frail health. At one point, her doctor took the young boy to one side and told him: “Don’t ever argue with your mother – you might kill her. Try to make her laugh.” Taking the doctor at his word, he spent hours trying to amuse her, and lived in dread of upsetting her. His mother had also been advised to lie with a brick, wrapped in a towel, on her chest. But this wasn’t comfortable, so instead, her son would lay with his head on her chest for hours on end. Later, he was sent to a boarding school where – as the only Jew – he was bullied and also molested. He left after a term. By his teens, he had become severely neurotic, beset by guilt about his mother’s suffering, and often overcome by a compulsion to pray loudly for forgiveness.
He’d caught the acting bug as a child, and after military service he won a place first at the Old Vic Theatre School in Bristol, and then at the Actors Studio in New York. Anticipating a career on stage, he changed his name because he couldn’t imagine a marquee reading “Jerome Silberman playing Hamlet”. But while appearing in Mother Courage and Her Children on Broadway in 1963, his co-star, Anne Bancroft, introduced him to her future husband, Mel Brooks, who saw his comic potential. Brooks was working on his script for The Producers, and asked Wilder to read for the part of the hyperneurotic, security blanket-carrying accountant Leo Bloom. The film finally came out in 1968, and with only his second big-screen role, Wilder became a star. (He had made his debut the year before, as the nervy undertaker in Bonnie and Clyde.)
He and Brooks went on to enjoy two more hits together – Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (largely Wilder’s creation). Wilder later became known for his collaborations with Richard Pryor, including Silver Streak and Stir Crazy; he won plaudits as Willy Wonka, though the film was not a success at the time; and was memorable as the doctor who falls in love with a sheep in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask). A master of the comedic pause, his rule for comedy was simple, said The New York Times: “Don’t try to make it funny; try to make it real.” He considered himself an actor, not a comic; he was not, he said, funny at home.
A sensitive, thoughtful man, Wilder rarely spoke about his first two marriages. Then, in 1981, on the set of Hanky Panky, he met and fell in love with the comedian Gilda Radner. Their relationship was fraught, but he found he couldn’t do without her. “We didn’t get along well, and that’s a fact. We just loved each other, and that’s a fact.” She died of ovarian cancer in 1989. After that, he largely retired from acting, and for several years, dedicated himself to raising awareness of ovarian cancer. He was married for the last 25 years of his life to Karen Boyer, a lipreading coach. They lived quietly in rural Connecticut, where they enjoyed writing (he published four novels) and painting watercolours. His 2005 memoir is dedicated “to Karen, without whom I would be floating like a cork in the ocean”.