“Dearest James, I don’t do or go where you were hoping, but I’ll be looking for you”.
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Russell Crowe remembered heading to his local cinema to watch Blazing Saddles multiple times, while comedian Jim Carrey said that Wilder “was one of the funniest and sweetest energies”.
A Milwaukee native, Wilder was born Jerome Silberman on June 11, 1933. ‘He blessed every film we did with his magic & he blessed me with his friendship’.
So instead of wallowing in what could be perceived as a tragedy, I’d like to reminisce about Gene Wilder’s work and how it affected my life. In 1961, he became a member of Lee Strasberg’s prestigious Actor’s Studio in Manhattan.
That same year, he adopted the stage name Gene Wilder and made both his off-Broadway and Broadway debuts. Little did he know that playing the chaplain in Jerome Robbins’s production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children” would set him on a path to becoming one of Hollywood’s foremost comic actors.
Gene Wilder’s long and illustrious career earned him two Oscar nominations for “The Producers” and “Young Frankenstein”, as well as a Golden Globe nomination for “Willy Wonka”.
Wilder was featured at the museum as part of their NEW/NOW series that was a program dedicated to exposing emerging artists over 11 years ago, after former director of development Ann Chamberlain got word of his residence in Stamford and checked out his work. And I knew it.
“The diagnosis was slow in coming but the symptoms were not”, says Walker-Pearlman who adds he is grateful that despite the awful disease his uncle “always recognized the people he loved and never changed his core personality”.
After Radner died of ovarian cancer in 1989, Wilder spent much of his time after promoting cancer research and opened a support facility for cancer patients. My love of storytelling surely would have gotten me in trouble had I gone to grade school one day with “Blazing Saddles” quotes spewing from my mouth.
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2016 has witnessed the death of too many creative luminaries. And it’s amusing, I was in costume and makeup – my tuxedo and makeup because I’d done a few shots before she arrived, and she told me later that she cried all the way in, in the auto, because she knew that she was going to fall in love with me and want to get married. “They always had that smile, that look of wonder”, Walker-Pearlman said.
