The actor starred in classic flicks like Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles and more. Remembering the fallen actor, Alice said, “I count working with Gene Wilder on his TV sitcom Something Wilder to be one of the most precious memories of my entire career”.
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“It is nearly unbearable for us to contemplate our life without him”, his nephew Jordan Walker-Pearlman said. Wilder and Pryor also co-starred in See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989), and Another You (1991).
In that 2013 chat, Wilder recounts how, on Willy Wonka, he was the one who suggested to director Mel Stuart that his character make his now-famous cane-enabled entrance.
The 1986 comedy may not be the first title you think of when you mention Gene Wilder, but it was a hilarious project that never gets the praise it deserves. They previously teamed up in Silver Streak, and “Stir Crazy” reunited the duo for another winning combination.
When actor Gene Wilder was a little boy, his mother had a heart attack, and in a story that Wilder told many times over the years, her attending physician gave him some advice that stuck with him into his later years. “I think I can be in the movies”.
Wilder’s film credits also include Blazing Saddles and The Producers, the latter of which earned him an Oscar nomination.
A lot of people say that their favorite actors helped shape them in one way or another and that is what Wilder was for me.
The son of a Russian Jewish immigrant, Wilder was born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1933.
He started taking acting classes at age 12 and continued performing and taking lesson through college. And although Wonka may have traumatized the spoiled children on screen, Wilder’s costars remember him as nothing but kind and thoughtful. His Broadway debut came playing the part of the comic valet in “The Complacent Lover” in 1961 which he won a Clement Derwent Award for his performance.
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Wilder is survived by his fourth wife Karen Boyer, whom he had married in 1991 and his nephew.
