Gene Wilder

American comic actor best known for his portrayals of high-strung neurotic characters.

As a youth in Milwaukee, Wilder was a student of the renowned acting instructor Herman Gottlieb, and in 1955 he graduated from the University of Iowa with a degree in theatre. In 1961 he joined the Actors Studio in New York City, where he studied under Lee Strasberg; in the same year, Wilder made his Broadway debut in the play Roots. During the next few years he acted in several Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, garnering good reviews for his performances in The Complaisant Lover (1961), Mother Courage and Her Children (1963), and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1963).

Wilder made his film debut with a small part in Warren Beatty’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967). A turning point in his career came when actor-director-writer Mel Brooks, whom Wilder had met during his Broadway days, cast Wilder in The Producers (1968) opposite the explosive Zero Mostel. Though the film did middling business at the time, it earned for Wilder an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor, and it has since come to be regarded as a classic comedy. He next starred in two films that have developed a cult following: Start the Revolution Without Me (1970), in which Wilder demonstrated his considerable skill at fencing, and Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx (1970), in which he delivered a sensitive performance as a Dublin dung salesman. Wilder was also memorable as the title character in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971) and as a respected doctor whose career is destroyed when he falls in love with a sheep in one segment of Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask (1972).

Wilder became a major star of the early 1970s with his performances in two hilariously scatological Brooks films, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein (both 1974). The first film, a ribald spoof of westerns, featured Wilder as the laconic “Waco Kid,” a drunken ex-gunslinger. Young Frankenstein, hailed by many critics as one of the greatest comedies ever made, provided Wilder with his best screen role, that of a third-generation member of the Frankenstein family who tries to deny his heritage and demands that his name be pronounced “Fronk-en-shteen.” Also for this film, Brooks and Wilder collaborated on the Oscar-nominated screenplay. Wilder’s success in the Brooks films inspired him to write and direct his own comedies, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother (1975) and The World’s Greatest Lover (1977). Most critics, however, found these films to be pale imitations of the Brooks style.

Wilder teamed with comic Richard Pryor for two popular comedies, Silver Streak (1976) and Stir Crazy (1980), and for two flops, See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989) and Another You (1991). He appeared with his wife, comedian Gilda Radner, in such films as Hanky Panky (1982), The Woman in Red (1984), and Haunted Honeymoon (1986). Following Radner’s death from ovarian cancer in 1989, Wilder established Gilda’s Club, a support centre for cancer patients.

In 2005 Wilder published Kiss Me Like a Stranger, a memoir. He also wrote the novels My French Whore (2007) and The Woman Who Wouldn’t (2008).