Comic actor delighted fans with offbeat roles
Wilder made movie debut in ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ in 1967.
Gene Wilder died Sunday from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. He was 83.
Gene Wilder, who established himself as one of America’s foremost comic actors with his delightfully neurotic performances in three films directed by Mel Brooks, his eccentric star turn in the family classic “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” and his winning chemistry with Richard Pryor in the box-office smash “Stir Crazy,” died on Sunday night in Connecticut. He was 83.
Eric Weissmann, who was Wilder’s lawyer for many years, confirmed the death. A nephew said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, The Associated Press reported. Wilder lived in Stamford, Conn.
Wilder’s rule for comedy was simple: Don’t try to make it funny, try to make it real. “I’m an actor, not a clown,” he said more than once.
With his haunted blue eyes and an empathy born of his own history of psychic distress, he aspired to touch audiences much as Charlie Chaplin had. The Chaplin film “City Lights,” he said, had “made the biggest impression on me as an actor.”
Wilder was an accomplished stage actor as well as a screenwriter, a novelist and the director of four movies in which he starred.
He made his movie debut in 1967 in Arthur Penn’s celebrated crime drama “Bonnie and Clyde,” in which he was memorably hysterical as an undertaker kidnapped by the notorious Depression-era bank robbers played by Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. He was even more hysterical, and even more memorable, a year later in “The Producers,” Brooks’ first film and the basis of his later Broadway hit.
The part earned Wilder an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor. Within a few years, the anxious, frizzy haired, popeyed Wilder had become an unlikely movie star.
He was nominated for a Golden Globe for his performance as the wizardly title character in “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory” (1971). The film was a box-office disappointment, in part because of parental concern that the moral of Roald Dahl’s story — greedy, gluttonous children should not go unpunished — was too dark in the telling. But it went on to gain a devoted following, and Willy Wonka remains one of the roles with which Wilder is most closely identified.
His next role was more adult but equally strange: an otherwise normal doctor who falls in love with a sheep named Daisy in a segment of Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask” in 1972. Two years later, he reunited with Brooks for perhaps the two best-known entries in either man’s filmography.
In “Blazing Saddles,” a raunchy, no-holds-barred spoof of Hollywood westerns, Wilder had the relatively quiet role of the Waco Kid, a boozy ex-gunfighter who helps an improbable black sheriff (Cleavon Little) save a town from railroad barons and venal politicians. The film’s once-daring humor may have lost some of its edge over the years, but Wilder’s next Brooks film, “Young Frankenstein,” has never grown old.
Wilder himself hatched the idea, envisioning a black-andwhite film faithful to the look of the Boris Karloff “Frankenstein” down to the laboratory equipment, but played for laughs rather than horror.
Brooks’ original reaction to the idea, Wilder recalled, was noncommittal: “Cute. That’s cute.” But he eventually came aboard as director and co-writer, and the two garnered an Oscar nomination for their screenplay.
Gene Wilder was born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee on June 11, 1933. His father, William, a manufacturer and salesman of novelty items, was an immigrant from Russia. His mother, the former Jeanne Baer, suffered from a rheumatic heart and a temperament that sometimes led her to punish him angrily and then smother him with regretful kisses.
Wilder’s association with Brooks led in turn to one with Richard Pryor, who was one of the writers of “Blazing Saddles.” In 1976, Pryor was third-billed behind Wilder and Jill Clayburgh in “Silver Streak,” a comic thriller. The two men went on to star in the 1982 box-office smash “Stir Crazy,” in which they played a hapless pair jailed for a crime they didn’t commit, as well as “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” (1989) and “Another You” (1991).
Wilder’s first two marriages, to Mary Mercier and Mary Joan Schutz, ended in divorce. In 1982, he met the “Saturday Night Live” comedian Gilda Radner when they were both cast in “Hanky Panky.”
Radner died in 1989.In memory of Radner, he helped to found an ovarian cancer detection center in her name, in Los Angeles, and Gilda’s Club, a network of support centers for women with cancer.
Wilder himself was stricken with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1999. With chemotherapy and a stem-cell transplant, he was in remission by 2005.
In 1991, Wilder married Karen Boyer, a hearing specialist who had coached him in the filming of “See No Evil, Hear No Evil,” in which his character was deaf and Pryor’s was blind.