He was not on the list.
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 early Monday morning at his
home in Stamford, Conn. He was 83.
A nephew, the filmmaker Jordan Walker-Pearlman, confirmed
his death in a statement, saying the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s
disease.
Mr. 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; it was funny, then sad, then both at the same
time.”
Mr. Wilder was an accomplished stage actor as well as a
screenwriter, a novelist and the director of four movies in which he starred.
(He directed, he once said, “in order to protect what I wrote, which I wrote in
order to act.”) But he was best known for playing roles on the big screen that
might have been ripped from the pages of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
of Mental Disorders.
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,” the first film by Mr. Brooks, who
later turned it into a Broadway hit.
Mr. Wilder played the security-blanket-clutching accountant
Leo Bloom, who discovers how to make more money on a bad Broadway show than on
a good one: Find rich backers, stage a production that’s guaranteed to fold
fast, then flee the country with the leftover cash. Unhappily for Bloom and his
fellow schemer, Max Bialystock, played by Zero Mostel, their outrageously
tasteless musical, “Springtime for Hitler,” is a sensation.
The part earned Mr. Wilder an Academy Award nomination for
best supporting actor. Within a few years, the anxious, frizzy-haired, popeyed
Mr. 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, partly because of parental concern
that the moral of Roald Dahl’s story — that 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 Mr.
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 Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Wilder’s next Brooks
film, “Young Frankenstein,” has never grown old.
Mr. Wilder himself hatched the idea, envisioning a
black-and-white film faithful to the look of the Boris Karloff “Frankenstein,”
down to the laboratory equipment, but played for laughs rather than for horror.
He would portray an American man of science, the grandson of the infamous Dr.
Frankenstein, who tries to turn his back on his heritage (“that’s Frahn-kahn-STEEN”)
but finds himself irresistibly drawn to Transylvania to duplicate his
grandfather’s creation of a monster in a spooky mountaintop laboratory.
Mr. Brooks’s original reaction to the idea, Mr. 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.
Serendipity played a role in the casting. Mr. Wilder’s agent
asked him to help find work for two new clients, and thus Marty Feldman became
Frankenstein’s assistant, Igor (“that’s EYE-gor”), and Peter Boyle the monster.
Madeline Kahn, whose performance as the chanteuse Lili Von Shtupp had been a
highlight of “Blazing Saddles,” played the doctor’s socialite fiancée. Cloris
Leachman was Frau Blücher, the sound of whose name caused horses to whinny in
fear.
The name Blücher, Mr. Wilder said in a 2008 interview with
The San Jose Mercury News, came from a book of letters to and from Sigmund
Freud: “I saw someone named Blücher had written to him, and I said, ‘Well,
that’s the name.’” And Mr. Wilder certainly knew a lot about Freud.
His first of many visits to a psychotherapist is the opening
scene in the memoir he published in 2005, “Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search
for Love and Art.”
“What seems to be the trouble?” the therapist asks.
“I want to give all my money away,” he says.
“How much do you have?”
“I owe three hundred dollars.”
Soon the jokes and evasions give way to the torments of
sexual repression, guilt feelings and his “demon,” a compulsion, lasting
several years, to pray out loud to God at the most embarrassing times and in
the most embarrassing places. But never onstage or onscreen, where he felt free
to be someone else.
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
rheumatic heart disease and a temperament that sometimes led her to punish
young Jerry angrily and then smother him with regretful kisses.
He spent one semester at the Black-Foxe Military Institute
in Hollywood. His mother saw it as a great opportunity; in reality, it was a
catch basin for boys from broken families, where he was regularly beaten up for
being Jewish.
Safely back home after that misadventure, he played minor
roles in community theater productions and then followed his older sister,
Corinne, into the theater program at the University of Iowa. After Iowa, he
studied Shakespeare at the Bristol Old Vic Theater School in England, where he
was the first freshman to win the school fencing championship.
He next enrolled part time at the HB Studio in New York,
while also serving a two-year Army hitch as an aide in the psychiatric unit of
the Valley Forge Army Hospital in Pennsylvania — an assignment he requested
because, he said, “I imagined the things I would see there might relate more to
acting than any of the other choices.” He added, “I wasn’t wrong.”
After his discharge, he won a coveted spot at the Actors
Studio, and it was then that he adopted the name Gene Wilder: Gene for Eugene
Gant, the protagonist of Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel,” and Wilder for
the playwright Thornton Wilder.
In his first major role on Broadway, Mr. Wilder played the
chaplain in a 1963 production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her
Children.” The production ran for less than two months, and he came to believe
that he had been miscast. The good news was that he met the boyfriend of the
star, Anne Bancroft: Mel Brooks, who wore a pea coat the night he met Mr.
Wilder backstage and told him, “You know, they used to call these urine
jackets, but they didn’t sell.”
So began the conversation that ultimately led to “The
Producers.”
Mr. Wilder’s association with Mr. Brooks led, in turn, to
one with Richard Pryor, who was one of the writers of “Blazing Saddles” (and
Mr. Brooks’s original choice for the part ultimately played by Mr. Little). In
1976, Mr. Pryor was third-billed behind Mr. Wilder and Jill Clayburgh in
“Silver Streak,” a comic thriller about murder on a transcontinental train. The
two men went on to star in the 1980 hit “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).
Mr. 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 the suspense comedy “Hanky
Panky.”
One evening, he recalled in “Kiss Me Like a Stranger,” he
and Ms. Radner innocently ended up at his hotel to review some script changes.
The time came for her to go; instead, she shoved him down on the bed, jumped on
top of him and announced, “I have a plan for fun!” He sent her home anyway —
she was married to another man — but before long, they began a relationship.
By his account, Ms. Radner was needy, obsessed with getting
married and, once they married in 1984, obsessed with having a child, a project
that ended in miscarriage just months before she learned she had ovarian cancer
in 1986.
In 1982, Mr. Wilder met Gilda Radner when they were both
cast in the suspense comedy “Hanky Panky.” Credit Columbia Picgtures, via
Everett Collection
Of their first year of living together, he wrote: “We didn’t
get along well, and that’s a fact. We just loved each other, and that’s a
fact.” He left, only to find that he needed to go back.
Ms. Radner died in 1989. “I had one great blessing: I was so
dumb,” Mr. Wilder once said of her last years. “I believed even three weeks
before she died she would make it.”
In memory of Ms. 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 people with cancer. He also contributed to a book, “Gilda’s
Disease” (1998), with Dr. M. Steven Piver.
Mr. Wilder himself developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 1999.
With chemotherapy and a stem-cell transplant, he was in remission by 2005.
In 1991 Mr. 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 Mr. Pryor’s was blind. She survives him, as does a
daughter from an earlier marriage. His sister died in January.
Even before he became ill, Mr. Wilder had begun slowing
down. He made his first and last attempt at a television series, the
short-lived and little-remembered comedy “Something Wilder,” in 1994.
He returned to the theater in 1997 in a London production of
Neil Simon’s “Laughter on the 23rd Floor.” In 1999 he was a writer for two TV
movies in which he starred, “Murder in a Small Town” and “The Lady in
Question,” playing a theater director turned amateur sleuth. In 2001 he
appeared at the Westport Country Playhouse in Connecticut in a program of
one-act farces. Shortly after appearing in an episode of “Will & Grace” in
2003 — he won an Emmy for that role — he declared that he had retired from
acting for good.
“I don’t like show business, I realized,” he said in 2008.
“I like show, but I don’t like the business.”
He was by then enjoying a new career as a novelist. His “My
French Whore,” published in 2007, was the story of a naïve young American who
impersonates a German spy in World War I. (“Just fluff, but sweet fluff,” the
novelist Carolyn See wrote in her review in The Washington Post.) It was followed
by two more novels, “The Woman Who Wouldn’t” and “Something to Remember You
By,” and a story collection, “What Is This Thing Called Love?”
But it was, of course, as an actor that Mr. Wilder left his
most lasting mark. In his memoir, he posed a question about his life’s work,
then answered it:
“What do actors really want? To be great actors? Yes, but
you can’t buy talent, so it’s best to leave the word ‘great’ out of it. I think
to be believed, onstage or onscreen, is the one hope that all actors share.”
Filmography
Film
Year Title Role Notes
1967 Bonnie and
Clyde Eugene Grizzard
1967 The Producers
Leopold "Leo" Bloom
1970 Start the
Revolution Without Me The
twins Claude and Philippe
1970 Quackser
Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx Quackser
Fortune
1971 Willy Wonka
& the Chocolate Factory Willy
Wonka
1972 Everything
You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) Dr. Doug Ross Segment: "What Is Sodomy?"
1974 Rhinoceros Stanley
1974 Blazing
Saddles Jim, "The Waco Kid"
1974 The Little
Prince The Fox
1974 Young
Frankenstein Dr. Frederick
Frankenstein Also writer
1975 The Adventure
of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother Sigerson
Holmes Also director and
writer
1976 Silver Streak
George Caldwell
1977 The World's
Greatest Lover Rudy Valentine, aka
Rudy Hickman Also producer,
director, and writer
1979 The Frisco
Kid Avram Belinski
1980 Sunday Lovers
Skippy Directed
"Skippy" segment
1980 Stir Crazy Skip Donahue
1982 Hanky Panky Michael Jordon
1984 The Woman in
Red Teddy Pierce Also director and writer
1986 Haunted
Honeymoon Larry Abbot Also director and writer
1989 See No Evil,
Hear No Evil Dave Lyons Also writer
1990 Funny About
Love Duffy Bergman
1991 Another You George/Abe Fielding
Television
Year Title Role Notes
1966 Death of a
Salesman Bernard Television film
1972–1977 The
Electric Company Voice for The
Adventures of Letterman Recurring role
1972 The Scarecrow
Lord Ravensbane/The Scarecrow Television film
1974 Thursday's
Game Harry Evers Television film
1993 Eligible
Dentist Toby Pilot
1994–1995 Something
Wilder Gene Bergman 15 episodes
1999 Murder in a
Small Town Larry
"Cash" Carter Television
film; co-written with Gilbert Pearlman
1999 Alice in
Wonderland The Mock Turtle Television film
1999 The Lady in
Question Larry "Cash"
Carter Television film;
co-written with Gilbert Pearlman
2002–2003 Will
& Grace Mr. Stein Episodes: "Boardroom and a
Parked Place", "Sex, Losers & Videotape"
Documentaries
Expo: Magic of the
White City (2005)
Stage
The Complaisant
Lover (Broadway, 1962)
Mother Courage and
Her Children (Broadway, 1963)
One Flew Over the
Cuckoo's Nest (Broadway, 1963)
The White House
(Broadway, 1964)
Luv (Broadway,
1966)
Laughter on the
23rd Floor (London, 1996)
