Remembering Gene Wilder – June 11, 1933- August 29, 2016.
The American comic actor, who has died from Alzheimer’s disease, will be best remembered for his playing of quirky, oddball and often hysterical characters in the films he made with Mel Brooks and also in those he wrote and directed himself. Michael Darvell pays tribute to one of the funniest of America’s funny men…
If ever children and their cinema-going parents recall Gene Wilder’s career in films, they may well think of Wilder as the titular role of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971), possibly the only ‘real musical’ that Wilder appeared in, and one in which he brought the character of the weirdly wonky chocolate factory owner to vivid and unforgettable life.
He may not, however, have been how Roald Dahl, who wrote the original book and co-authored the screenplay, intended him to be. Dahl would rather have cast Spike Milligan in the part. Still, Wilder managed to imbue the role with the requisite oddity of the philanthropic chocolatier… and the film had some memorable songs too, courtesy of Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, including ‘The Candy Man Can’, ‘Pure Imagination’, ‘Cheer Up, Charlie’ and ‘Oompa Loompa’ etc.
Of course, there had been another ‘musical’ film in Wilder’s career, and that was The Producers (1968), the one that sealed Wilder’s collaborations with Mel Brooks. The director had met Wilder when the actor was appearing with Brooks’ then girlfriend – Anne Bancroft, who he subsequently married – in a production of Mother Courage in 1963.
When casting the part of Leo Bloom, the hysterical accountant employed by Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) to cook his theatrical books, Brooks had asked Peter Sellers but, getting no answer, he instead remembered the funny guy from Mother Courage and the small part he played as the nervous undertaker in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967). So he cast Wilder, whom he thought was a natural comic talent, as Bloom, who becomes hysterical when he can’t hold his little blue security blanket.
From then on ‘hysteria’ seemed to be the watchword in any Wilder performance. Musically The Producers will be forever remembered as the film that introduced a song and dance number in the worst possible taste, namely ‘Springtime for Hitler’. Although it opened modestly in 1968, the movie went on to become an iconic classic film spawning a remake and then a stage show based on it.
Gene Wilder was born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee to William J. Silberman, a Russian-Jewish manufacturer of miniature whisky and beer bottles, and Jeanne Baer, of Russian-Jewish parentage, from Illinois.
Having majored in theatre at the University of Iowa, Wilder longed to be an actor and came to the UK to study at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School but left early, preferring to return to the States and Lee Strasberg’s Actors’ Studio.
His first major role came Off-Broadway in Arnold Wesker’s Roots in 1960 and then he went to Broadway with Michael Redgrave and Googie Withers in Graham Greene’s The Complaisant Lover, for which he won the 1962 Clarence Derwent Award in a supporting role by a newcomer. Then in 1963 he worked with Anne Bancroft in Mother Courage, the production that changed his life. He was also in productions of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1963), The White House (1964) and Luv (1966).
Wilder made some television appearances before he was cast in Bonnie and Clyde, namely Maxwell Anderson’s The Wingless Victory (1961) with Eartha Kitt, Cathleen Nesbit and Hugh O’Brian, an Armstrong Circle Theatre production called The Man Who Refused to Die (1962), The Defenders series (1962) with E.G. Marshall and Robert Read, three episodes of The DuPont Show of the Week (1962-63) and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1966) with Lee J. Cobb, Albert Dekker, Mildred Dunnock, James Farentino, George Segal and Karen Steele. Wilder occasionally returned to television during his film career, and worked exclusively on TV from 1993 for ten years until he retired from acting in 2003.
With Bonnie and Clyde and The Producers under his belt, Wilder went on to make Start the Revolution Without Me (1970), Bud Yorkin’s spoof historical comedy about twins in the French Revolution, with Wilder playing both parts, and co-starring Donald Sutherland, Hugh Griffith, Billie Whitelaw and Victor Spinetti in a sort of Carry On romp but much funnier and wittier.
Before Willy Wonka, Wilder played a Dublin dung-seller in Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx (1970) and after Wonka he was in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex… *But Were Afraid to Ask (1972), playing a doctor who goes to bed with his pet sheep. As you can see, Wilder was never cast in ordinary or even vaguely normal roles. Rhinoceros (1974) with Zero Mostel was a film of the Eugene Ionesco play in which people turn into rhinos… You see what I mean?
Then came Blazing Saddles (1974), with Mel Brooks again, in the famous comedy western co-written by Brooks and others including Richard Pryor. Like most Brooks films there were songs, from the title tune over the credits to the ‘I’m Tired’ number sung by Dietrich lookalike Madeline Kahn, the Busby Berkeley pastiche number and, of course, an appearance by Count Basie and his orchestra.
Wilder played Jim, the Waco Kid, a drunken gunslinger who teams up with Bart to save the town of Rockridge from the developers. It’s his best film and Brooks’ too. Co-writer Richard Pryor also wanted the role of Bart the black sheriff, but lost out to Cleavon Little. Also in 1974 was Young Frankenstein in which Brooks comically reinvented the Universal Pictures horror movies of the 1930s with perfect settings that matched the originals.
Wilder plays the grandson of Doctor Frankenstein with Marty Feldman as the servant Igor and Peter Boyle as the Monster. Most memorable was their singing of a duet of ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz’! Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman and Teri Garr were also brilliant. Another film from 1974 was The Little Prince, a musical version by Lerner and Loewe, but Stanley Donen’s film was not a great success, even with Wilder playing the Fox and Bob Fosse as the Snake.
Wilder then progressed to writing and directing as well as appearing in his own films. The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’s Smarter Brother (1975) and The World’s Greatest Lover (1977) were reasonably amusing, but Hanky Panky (1982) and Haunted Honeymoon (1986) were really not worthy of him. Better to remember the good stuff he made with Richard Pryor: Silver Streak (1976), Stir Crazy (1980), See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989) and Another You (1991), although the last of the quartet was nowhere near as good as the rest.
I interviewed Wilder at the time of the release of See No Evil, Hear No Evil, in 1989, just after his third wife, the stand-up comedian Gilda Radner, with whom he had made the films Hanky Panky, The Woman in Red and Haunted Honeymoon, had died at the age of 42 of ovarian cancer.
By way of doing something positive to counteract his late wife’s death, Wilder set up the Gilda Radner Ovarian Cancer Detection Centre in Los Angeles and helped found Gilda’s Club, a support group to raise awareness of the disease, beginning in New York and later opening other groups around the States. Wilder himself had a cancer scare in 1999 but survived until in his last years he contracted Alzheimer’s disease. He told nobody about his condition as he hated the thought of turning away a smile.
Another You in 1991 was Wilder’s last film for the cinema. For another decade he appeared on television but retired after episodes of Will & Grace in 2003. He came to London in 1996 to appear on stage for the last time in Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor. Although enjoyable enough, it was not one of Simon’s best plays but Wilder was brilliant, playing a character based on the comedian Sid Caesar. The play dealt with the writers – including Simon himself – who had to come up with new scripts every week for Caesar’s 1950s TV series Your Show of Shows. After retiring from performing, Wilder and his fourth wife, Karen Boyer, moved to Stanford, Connecticut where he concentrated on painting and writing novels and a memoir.
In his day Wilder was one of the most likeable and hilariously funny actors imaginable. His comedic talents knew no bounds, and as a legacy he has left us with some memorable moments of the pure comic invention he exhibited in his films.
This writer never fails to find The Producers, Blazing Saddles or Young Frankenstein as fresh and as funny as the day they were first released. To still be thoroughly moved to joy by these films proves that Gene Wilder, with the aid of Mel Brooks, produced works of legendary status – instant classics that can be viewed over and over again.
Michael Darvell
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