Where the Wilder Things Were

Throughout his life, but especially in his later years, Gene Wilder fiercely defended his privacy, which included the decision to not disclose his diagnosis of Alzheimer's three years before complications from the disease claimed his life on August 29, 2011. According to Wilder's nephew, Jordan Walker-Pearlman, the choice to keep his condition under wraps was made by the actor not out of vanity but so that children who adored him from "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" wouldn't feel unduly worried or confused. Walker-Pearlman said, "He simply couldn't bear the idea of one less smile in the world."

He was born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee on June 11, 1933. After graduating from the University of Iowa in 1955, he was accepted at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in England, where he became the first freshman to win the All-School Fencing Championship, a skill he would later utilize in "Start the Revolution Without Me" and "The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother."

Gene Wilder wistfully contemplates his future
at the Old Vic Theatre School.

Gene Wilder's first professional acting job was in a small theater in Cambridge, north of London, where he worked as an actor (Second Officer) and as the fencing choreographer for a 1959 production of Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night."

Wishing to study Method Acting, Wilder returned to the U.S., just in time to be drafted into the Army, where he was assigned to the medical corps. On the advice of a friend, fellow actor Charles Grodin, Wilder studied acting with Lee Strasberg and was accepted into the Actors Studio. At age 26, he chose his show business name in the late 1950s because the surname reminded him of "Our Town" playwright Thornton Wilder, while "Gene" came from Eugene Gant, the name of the protagonist in Thomas Wolfe's first novel, Look Homeward, Angel. 

In 1963, Gene Wilder played a leading role in Bertolt Brecht's "Mother Courage and Her Children." Wilder was convinced he was miscast, but the production costarred Anne Bancroft, who introduced Wilder to her boyfriend (and future husband), Mel Brooks. Brooks later told Wilder he was working on a screenplay for a comedy called "Springtime for Hitler," for which he thought Wilder would be perfect in the role of Leo Bloom, the tightly wound accountant.

After three years of not hearing another word, Wilder was finally contacted by Brooks, who arranged a meeting with Zero Mostel. Mostel, who would star as fraudulent producer Max Bialystock, had approval of his costar, and he gave his OK after kissing Wilder full on the lips. The title was changed to "The Producers," and the 1968 film gave Wilder his breakout role.

Lee Meredith (right) plays Ulla, the English-challenged Swedish
secretary Max Bialystock discovered in the local library.

However, we're not here to talk about the roles that made Gene Wilder a beloved and wildly popular movie star. That's all we have to say about "The Producers." We won't be discussing Mel Brooks' "Blazing Saddles" or "Young Frankenstein," nor will we consider Wilder's own Brooksian spoofs "The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother" and "The World's Greatest Lover." We won't be talking about the four comedies Wilder made with Richard Pryor or the three comedies he starred in with his late wife, Gilda Radner. And finally, there will be nary a mention of his most enduring screen character, the title role in "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory." Retrospectives, reviews, re-reviews, analyses, and appreciations of these movies have been beaten to death.

We're going to usher you down a different aisle in the Moviehouse for a look at a side or two of Gene Wilder you might have been unaware of. Here's something right off the bat: Did you know Gene Wilder was an accomplished painter of watercolors?

Gene Wilder painted this watercolor titled "Betty" in 1997.

In 1966, Gene Wilder appeared in a CBS-TV production of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman" as Bernard, the son of Willy Loman's wisecracking neighbor, Charley. Lee J. Cobb, who originated the role of Willy on Broadway in 1949, starred in the television film, with James Farentino and George Segal as his sons.

Gene Wilder's role as Bernard in the 1966 TV presentation of
"Death of a Salesman" was his first "onscreen" appearance.

Wilder's motion picture debut came when he was cast in a small but memorable role in "Bonnie and Clyde" (1967). The bank-robbing duo (Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty), along with Clyde's brother Buck (Gene Hackman), his wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons), and wheelman C.W. Moss (Michael J. Pollard), take timid undertaker Eugene Grizzard (Gene Wilder) and his female companion Velma (Evans Evans) hostage.

The characters of Eugene and Velma were based on real-life mortician Dillard Darby and Sophia Stone of Ruston, Louisiana, who, on the night of April 27, 1933, were briefly kidnapped by the Barrow gang. They were released unharmed, and Clyde Barrow handed Darby a $5 bill to get back to town. During the abduction, when Darby mentioned being an undertaker, Bonnie Parker joked that maybe he would work on her someday. A year later, Darby was one of the morticians assisting in the embalming of Parker's bullet-riddled corpse.

Actress Evans Evans (right) was married to director John
Frankenheimer from 1963 to his death in 2002. She appeared
in six of her husband's films, including "All Fall Down" (1962),
which also starred Warren Beatty, and "Grand Prix" (1966).

Wilder brought a quirky twist to his part, initially unexpected by but ultimately embraced by the filmmakers. Wilder's character wastes little time in ingratiating himself to his captors, and in no time at all, everybody is laughing it up, until Evans Evans' Velma accidentally lets slip her real age, obviously older than Eugene had been led to believe. The shell-shocked expression on Wilder's face is priceless.

In 1970, Bud Yorkin produced and directed “Start the Revolution Without Me” (executive produced by Yorkin's longtime TV partner, Norman Lear), a sporadically hysterical satire of The Corsican Brothers, The Man in the Iron Mask, and A Tale of Two Cities that beat Mel Brooks' genre spoofs “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein” to the punch by four years. The screenplay was written by Fred Freeman and Lawrence J. Cohen, who scripted the 1976 disaster movie parody "The Big Bus," starring Stockard Channing and Joseph Bologna.

Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland portray (left) reluctant
revolutionaries Claude and Charles Coupe and (right) the
haughty "Corsican Brothers" Philippe and Pierre de Sisi.

Set during the French Revolution (and shot on-location in France), the film featured Gene Wilder and Donald Sutherland as two sets of identical twins accidentally mismatched at birth, one pair raised in poverty, the other in aristocracy. 

The Monty Python-esque pairing of a manic Gene Wilder with a
dead pet falcon named "Paul": "Do you want to see excitement?!
I'll show you excitement if that's what you want to see!" Wilder
chose to star in "Start the Revolution Without Me" over the role
of Lt. Milo Menderbinder in "Catch-22," which went to Jon Voight.

There are a number of scene-stealers in the supporting cast of "Start the Revolution Without Me," including Victor Spinetti and Billie Whitelaw as royal court plotters Duke D'Escargot and Marie Antoinette (pictured below).

The Duke D'Escargot: "I warn you, gentlemen, I am not to be
trifled with. To pull the tail of a lion is to open the mouth of trouble
and reveal the teeth of revenge biting the tongue of deceit!"

Billie Whitelaw, who enjoyed a longtime association with playwright Samuel Beckett (he regarded her as his muse and referred to her as "a perfect actress"), is probably best known to American audiences as the evil nanny Mrs. Baylock in the original "The Omen." Welsh-born Victor Spinetti, whose 50-year career included stints with the Royal Shakespeare Company, appeared in the two Beatles motion pictures "A Hard Day's Night" and "Help!" and their television film "Magical Mystery Tour."

Victor Spinetti clowns with John Lennon on the set of "Help!"

Hugh Griffith, the venerable Welsh-born character actor who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as an Arab sheik in “Ben-Hur,” delivers a deliriously inspired interpretation of King Louis XVI as an insipid buffoon (pictured below, with Billie Whitelaw).

Hugh Griffith as Louis XVI: "I thought it was a costume ball!"

Orson Welles, who introduces the picture from the visually stunning 17th-century Chateau de Vaux-le-Vicomte, utilized on-screen as the summer palace of Louis XVI (pictured below), laments that "Start the Revolution Without Me" is a film in color that "I'm not in."

After filming "Start the Revolution Without Me" in France, Gene Wilder returned to New York City, where he read the script for an Ireland-based romantic comedy called "Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx," written by Dublin-born novelist-screenwriter-playwright Gabriel Walsh. Wilder phoned Sidney Glazier, who had produced "The Producers," and the two men looked for a suitable director, finally hiring British-Indian filmmaker Waris Hussein.

Quackser's family urges him to look for a real job,
or at least one that doesn't smell.

Filmed on location in Dublin and at Ireland's sole film studio, Ardmore Studios, the picture presents Wilder as a poor Irish manure collector who scoops up dung from horse carts on the streets of Dublin to sell to kindly, elderly women for their lawns and flower gardens. He meets and falls in love with an American college exchange student named Zazel (Margot Kidder), but his little, idiosyncratic world is shaken when horse carts are banned in Dublin and his newly discovered girlfriend prepares to move back to America.

Quackser Fortune (Gene Wilder) and Zazel (Margot Kidder)
share an alfresco luncheon on the back of his dung cart.

Reviewing the movie for The New York Times, critic Vincent Canby, who called it "a well-meaning, professional Irish comedy. nicely acted, prettily photographed," commented, "Gene Wilder, a gifted American actor, has perfected a fine, bogus brogue for his role as Quackser, but he lacks the ability to communicate the sort of humility by which Chaplin once made humiliation as funny and affecting as it was also embarrassing."

In an obituary for Wilder, the Los Angeles Times noted, "Throughout his career, even in his most wildly antic performances, Wilder's comedy was often tinged with an undeniable undercurrent of sadness...that he shared with one of his comic heroes, Charlie Chaplin." Wilder once said that Chaplin's "City Lights," a silent romantic comedy released in 1931, had "made the biggest impression on me as an actor; it was funny, then sad, then both at the same time."

As for Margot Kidder's presence in "Quackser Fortune," Canby commented, "Miss Kidder, who looks like Ali McGraw (which is, apparently, the prototype look for American actresses in this first year of a new decade), is a complete mystery, which is the way the role was written."

Both "Start the Revolution Without Me" and "Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx," as well as, for that matter, "The Producers," were box-office disappointments (although, over time, "The Producers" has assuredly gained in stature and popularity). "Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory" didn't fare well financially at first either. When Woody Allen offered Gene Wilder a role in a segment of his 1972 comedy anthology film "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask)," he promptly accepted, hoping it would be a hit and put an end to his series of flops.

To his chagrin, Wilder was cast as a psychiatrist who falls in love with an Armenian sheep in the vignette titled "What Is Sodomy?" In a review of Wilder's later performance in his own "The World's Greatest Lover," A.V. Club's Nathan Rabin noted, "As he indelibly illustrated in the otherwise-dreadful 'Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex...' Gene Wilder is likely the world's only actor capable of conveying innocence, vulnerability, and pathos while playing a character locked in a destructive relationship with a sheep. The elfin, other-worldly qualities of Wilder's doe-eyed man-child persona can be alternately endearing and disturbing..."

Gene Wilder later compared his experience with Woody Allen
as a director like "working on a Bergman set: people talking
in whispers, serious looks on Woody's face.
He communicated through silence."

"Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex" indeed proved to be a smash hit, becoming the 13th highest grossing picture of 1972.

The advertising campaign for the 1974 movie "Rhinoceros" obviously hoped to tap into re-teaming of Gene Wilder and Zero Mostel from Mel Brooks' "The Producers." However, "Rhinoceros," based on an absurdist comedy by Romanian-French playwright Eugene Ionesco, explored such themes as individuality, conformity, morality, and mob mentality, esoteric considerations with a modicum of mass appeal.

Stanley (Gene Wilder) is a mild-mannered, virtually identity-less office clerk who observes that the residents of a small town are inexplicably becoming actual rhinoceroses. Zero Mostel plays his fastidious neighbor and best friend, while Karen Black appears as Wilder's girlfriend. The film was released as part of the American Film Theatre, a limited-run series of 14 screen adaptations of stage plays in the mid-1970s, including 1973's "The Iceman Cometh," directed by John Frankenheimer and featuring the all-star cast of Lee Marvin, Frederic March, Robert Ryan, and Jeff Bridges (not to mention Frankenheimer's aforementioned wife, Evans Evans).

"Rhinoceros" had a middling run on Broadway in 1961, featuring Zero Mostel, Eli Wallach (pictured above, with Mostel), and Anne Jackson (Wallach's wife). In his review of the film version, The New York Times critic Vincent Canby observed, "Mr. Ionesco apparently wants us to see 'Rhinoceros' as a parable about conformity and the contagion that could convert supposedly moral, rational people into the ecstatically mindless mobs that idolized Hitler as the last word in authority figures." Canby called it "the kind of theater of the absurd" that "is not ideal film material."

The movie was directed by Tom O'Horgan, a theater director best known for the Broadway stagings of "Hair" and "Jesus Christ Superstar." Although O'Horgan thought about using live animals to depict the transformations, no rhino is ever seen on camera. Shadows and point-of-view photography suggested the presence of the animals. According to Vincent Canby, O'Horgan's "feel for slapstick is as solemn as that of an archaeologist photographing the individual bones of a dinosaur."

Stanley (Gene Wilder): "People who try to hang onto their
individuality always come to a bad end."

Regarding Gene Wilder's performance as the pencil-pushing office drone, Canby commented, "Mr. Wilder has an innate sweetness that neutralizes the dumbness of Stanley." Canby added, "Miss Black (pictured below), like Mr. Mostel, successfully created a cartoon character out of pure flesh and blood, hers being a caricature of Little Orphan Annie, though not so articulate."

The year 1980 saw the release of what is undoubtedly Gene Wilder's most obscure motion picture, "Sunday Lovers," an internationally co-produced romantic comedy consisting of four stories, each from a different country - England, France, Italy, and the U.S.

The legacy of Monty Python's Flying Circus is
maligned in an ad for a completely different comedy.

The British vignette featured Priscilla Barnes, Roger Moore and Lynn Redgrave (pictured below).

In The New York Times, the ubiquitous Vincent Canby deemed the American segment of "Sunday Lovers" "the most appalling contribution...something called 'Skippy,' about a doltish fellow...who has signed himself into a mental hospital because he has a sex problem. We are told the problem is premature ejaculation." Played by Gene Wilder, who wrote and directed the piece, Skippy meets a beautiful woman (Kathleen Quinlan), who, in Canby's words, "has problems of her own." Canby rued that "Miss Quinlan remains one of Hollywood's great, mostly untapped natural resources."

Canby dubbed Wilder "a maddening talent, capable of marvelous work in films like Mel Brooks' 'Young Frankenstein,' his own 'Sherlock Holmes' Smarter Brother' and in Woody Allen's 'Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex,' but he's not even tolerable in things like 'Stir Crazy' and this minor mess. His fatal weakness is to cast himself not simply as a love-object but as a love-object who is full of pathos."

Two years later, in 1982's "Hanky Panky," the first screen pairing of Gene Wilder and future wife Gilda Radner (which was actually storyboarded as the third comedy costarring Wilder and Richard Pryor until the latter mysteriously dropped out), Kathleen Quinlan was reunited with Wilder in a role as an ill-fated mob informant (pictured below).

Gene Wilder's first movie role after the 1989 death of third wife Gilda Radner, and his penultimate screen role, was in the 1990 romantic comedy "Funny About Love," directed by Leonard Nimoy. As a director, Nimoy, who had enjoyed a degree of success helming "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock" and "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home," briefly dabbled in parental-themed rom-coms and dramas like "Three Men and a Baby" (starring Tom Selleck, Ten Danson, and Steve Guttenberg), "The Good Mother" (with Diane Keaton and Liam Neeson), and "Holy Matrimony" (starring Patricia Arquette) before giving up his director's chair in 1994.

Gene Wilder and his "Funny About Love" director,
Leonard Nimoy, are obviously having a better time
than audiences who saw the film did.

Janet Maslin, of The New York Times, remarked, "Infertility, divorce and loneliness shape the rambling plot," doing "little to make the film substantial," while Roger Ebert wrote, "'Funny About Love' provides an opportunity to spend 101 minutes in the presence of the most cloying, inane and annoying dialogue I've heard in many a moon, punctuated only by occasional lapses into startling bad manners."

Mary Stuart Masterson (left) plays a young - much younger -
love interest for cartoonist Gene Wilder in "Funny About Love."

The fourth and final pairing of Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor, the little-seen 1991 comedy "Another You," costarring Mercedes Ruehl and Stephen Lang, killed Wilder's screen career. In a 2008 interview with Alec Baldwin for the cable channel Turner Classic Movies, Wilder said, "I don't like show business...I like show, but I don't like the business." 

The Los Angeles Times obituary noted, "Although fans who'd grown up on his films of the 1970s may have yearned to see him return to the big screen, Wilder found increasingly little appeal in the kind of comedies Hollywood turned out, which to his mind too often stressed profanity over genuine humor."

In a 2013 interview with Time Out New York magazine, Wilder remarked, "I'm tired of the bombing, shooting, killing, swearing and 3-D. I get 52 movies a year sent to me, and maybe there are three good (ones). That's why I went into writing." From 1998 to 2013, he authored a memoir, three novels and a collection of short stories. He said, "It's not that I wouldn't act again. I'd say, 'Give me the script. If it's something wonderful, I'll do it.' But I don't get anything like that."

As mentioned, what Gene Wilder really enjoyed was writing. He once said he became a director "in order to protect what I wrote, which I wrote in order to act."

Ill-advisedly, in 1994, Gene Wilder starred in the NBC sitcom "Something Wilder." The 60-something Wilder played a 50-something husband who, with his 30-something wife (Hillary Bailey Smith), copes with raising 4-year-old fraternal twin sons (pictured above). The series was summarily canceled after 18 episodes into its first season.

Not even a desperate, last-ditch retro-guest appearance
by Alice Cooper could salvage "Something Wilder."

Wilder went to London in 1996 to star in a staging of "Laughter on the 23rd Floor," a semi-autobiographical comedy by Neil Simon based on his experiences as a writer for TV's "Your Show of Shows." Wilder played Max Prince, a character inspired by Sid Caesar, in the play, which ran for five months at London's West End theatre. 

Gene Wilder rehearses a scene from "Laughter on the 23rd
Floor" with American compatriot, actor Rolf Saxon.

In 1999, Gene Wilder co-wrote and starred in a pair of 1930s period mysteries for A&E. "Murder in a Small Town" and "The Lady in Question" cast Wilder as crime-solving theater director "Cash" Carter (pictured below).

Mike Starr (left), a hulking presence - usually as a gangster or
henchman - in several pictures, including "Goodfellas," "Billy
Bathgate," and "The Ice Harvest," plays Detective Tony Rossini
in "Murder in a Small Town" and "The Lady in Question."

Wilder portrayed the Mock Turtle in Hallmark Entertainment's lavishly produced "Alice in Wonderland" (1999) for NBC-TV (pictured below).

Also in 1999, Gene Wilder developed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Through chemotherapy and a stem-cell transplant, he was in complete remission by 2005. His final performances were in 2002 and 2003 as Mr. Stein, Will Truman's boss on the NBC sitcom "Will & Grace" (pictured below), a role that garnered him an Emmy Award as Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series.

In 1977, Gene Wilder told the Los Angeles Times that what saved him from his darkest self was his unfailing ability to tap into an imaginative streak of comic insanity that ran deep inside him. "That I will probably have until the day I die," he said, "and that's probably why people pay money to see me. So I'd be insane to lose my insanity."

The Los Angeles Times remembered Gene Wilder as "a two-time
Oscar nominee who brought a unique blend of manic energy and
world-weary melancholy to films..."

According to The New York Times obituary, "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." In truth, he always considered himself more of an actor than a comedian. Nephew Jordan Walker-Pearlman commented, "He did occasionally think of himself as a comic actor, but actor first. There were very few things that could hurt his feelings, and one of them was if he was described as a comedian as opposed to an actor."

In his 2006 autobiography Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art, Wilder posed the question, "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...is the one hope that all actors share."

Mel Brooks, Peter Boyle, Teri Garr, Gene Wilder, and Cloris
Leachman enjoy a dinner break from "Young Frankenstein."

Mel Brooks remembered Gene Wilder on Twitter as "one of the truly great talents of our time. He blessed every film we did with his magic and he blessed me with his friendship."