To be a true comedian is to revel in madness, and one look at Gene Wilder’s eyes on screen was all an audience needed to know they were in for a hilarious treat. Whether it was as the mad doctor Frankenstein (it’s pronounced Fronk-en-steen), or devious accountant Leo Bloom, his natural wit, sweet nature, and easy charm have helped him remain an icon of film two decades since he last appeared on the big screen.
Born in Wisconsin on June 11, 1933, Gene Wilder (named Jerome Silberman at birth) developed his sense of humour at a young age out of a sense of necessity. His mother, Jeanne, suffered from rheumatic heart disease, and the doctor was sure to warn him “Don’t ever argue with your mother. You might kill her. Try to make her laugh”. And so he did.
A passion for acting soon followed suit, when he saw his sister perform onstage. 11 years old at the time, he asked the teacher whether he could learn the craft, and was told that if he was still interested at 13, he could become a student. The day Wilder turned 13, he called the teacher, and was accepted.
He studied for the next two years, and showed great potential. So much so, that his mother decided to send him to Black-Foxe military institute in Hollywood. What could have been a great opportunity turned out to be anything but. Targeted as the only Jewish boy at the school, he was physically and sexually assaulted, and returned home soon after.
Upon arriving back in Milwaukee, Wilder connected with the local theatre community and booked his first role in front of a paying audience as Balthasar in Romeo & Juliet.
Wilder graduated from Washington High School in 1951, and travelled to the University of Iowa, where he studied Communications. After completing the course, he then set sail for England, and was accepted into the prestigious Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. Here, he studied not just the theatre, but also fencing, and won the All-School Fencing Championship. It was this talent that allowed him to pay the bills by working as a fencing instructor while studying Stanislavski’s system of emotional acting in New York.
Just when Wilder seemed ready to break onto the scene, he was enlisted into the armed forces, and worked as a paramedic in Pennsylvania.
In 1959, Wilder changed his name from Jerome Silberman after realised he “couldn’t quite see a marquee reading ‘Jerry Silberman as Macbeth”. His first name derived from Thomas Wolfe’s character Eugene Gant from Look Homeward, Angel, while the surname was a mark of respect for playwright Thornton Wilder.
Soon, Wilder was making a name off-Broadway with performances in Twelfth Night, Roots, and The Complaisant Lover, the latter of which saw him win a Clarence Derwent Award.
It was a 1963 production of Mother Courage and Her Children that would change the course of Wilder’s career for the better. Starring alongside Anne Bancroft, he was introduced to her boyfriend, Mel Brooks. The two became firm friends, and Wilder made a promise to Brooks that he would check to see if the latter had any films ready to enter pre-production before making long-term commitments to any other project.
It took three years before Wilder would be called up to star in Brooks’ The Producers – during which time he made his cinematic debut with an unforgettable turn as the undertaker taken hostage by the criminal couple in Bonnie and Clyde – and though it struggled upon initial release, the movie became a cult classic, and saw Wilder nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the Academy Awards.
His next big hit would be remembered as his biggest of all: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Wilder came in to read for Willy Wonka, and before he could even leave the building, director Mel Stuart ran after him to offer the role. Wilder took it, under one condition:
“When I make my first entrance, I’d like to come out of the door carrying a cane and then walk toward the crowd with a limp. After the crowd sees Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk toward them, my cane sinks into one of the cobblestones I’m walking on and stands straight up, by itself… but I keep on walking, until I realise that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause.”
“Why?”, asked a surprised Stuart.
“Because from that time on, no one will know if I’m lying or telling the truth.”
Wilder’s blending of childhood wonder with cruel intentions created one of the most outstanding characters in the history of family films, but it was too ahead of its time. The movie was perceived as too mature by some, and was a flop, as were the two other pictures he starred in between The Producers and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (But Were Afraid to Ask) got his career back on track in the eyes of the studios when it grossed $18 million on a $2 million budget. What followed next was a whirlwind of activity. He released four films in 1974: Rhinoceros, The Little Prince, Mel Brooks’ Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein, which was primarily written by Wilder himself. The latter was nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards, and is often found on lists of the greatest comedies of all time.
The following year, Wilder made history when he teamed up with Richard Pryor to shoot Silver Streak, the first successful interracial film comedy duo in Hollywood history. They would make three more movies together: Stir Crazy, See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Another You. Wilder also continued writing and directing his own films, including The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother, The World’s Greatest Lover, The Woman in Red, and Haunted Honeymoon.
Another You would mark not just the end of Wilder and Pryor’s partnership, but the end of Wilder’s film career altogether. He would later explain to film historian Robert Osborne that he would have continued in the business, but felt that the quality of content had diminished severely over the decades.
““But then I didn’t want to do the kind of junk that I was seeing. I didn’t want to do 3D, for instance. I didn’t want to do ones with bombing and loud and swearing, so much swearing going on. Someone said, ‘Oh, go f–k yourself.’ Well, if it was coming from a meaningful place I would understand it. But if you go to some of the movies, I don’t want to say which ones, can’t they just stop and talk? Once in a while it comes in handy but not running all the way through the film, and that put me out a lot.”
In semi-retirement, Wilder focused on painting and writing. In total, he wrote six books, both fiction and non-fiction. One of these, Gilda’s Disease: Sharing Personal Experiences and a Medical Perspective on Ovarian Cancer, detailing his life with wife Gilda Radner as she battled with the illness. He spent many of his last years promoting awareness and raising funds for the treatment of ovarian cancer.
On August 29th, 2016, Gene Wilder died after a quiet battle with Alzheimer’s disease. Though in the last 20 years he had only appeared in half-a-dozen productions, his loss was felt as severely as if his most popular work had been released only yesterday.
Such was the power of Wilder to create a memorable character. He hated the business, but he loved the show, and that came through in everything that he did. Though he aged, his performances did not, and they never will.