Wilder also worked closely with one of his very close friends, the late Richard Pryor in hit comedy films such as “Stir Crazy”, and “Silver Streak” to name just a couple of the outrageously amusing, and sometimes a bit raunchy comedy hits. Working with Mel Brooks, he provided the flawless expression of Brooks’ directing style, which reveled in over-the-top absurdity. “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein”, were, respectively, the top and fourth-highest grossing movies of 1974.
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RIP, Gene Wilder. Your spirit will be sorely missed. Pauline Kael’s glowing review of the movie began by praising Wilder as “a magnetic blur … an actor who can play serious roles and well as comic ones…a superb technician.[and] … an inspired original”.
Born Jerome Silberman in Wisconsin in 1933, Wilder was the son of a Russian Jewish immigrant father and his mother was of Polish descent.
The New York Times called Wilder’s performance in “Young Frankenstein”, which he co-wrote with Brooks, a “marvelous addled mixture of young Tom Edison, Winnie-the-Pooh, and your average Playboy reader with a keen appreciation of handsome bosoms”.
Even though he had been married to his second wife for 25 years at the time of his death, Wilder’s personal life may be best recalled by Baby Boomers as the husband of comic actress Gilda Radner, famed for her bizarrely amusing “Saturday Night Live” sketches. In 1961, Wilder became a member of Lee Strasberg’s prestigious Actor’s Studio in Manhattan. Scores of people are heartbroken at his death, but surely Wilder, who devoted himself to making others laugh, would want people to remember him for the joy and hilarity he brought to their lives.
For many comedy enthusiasts, “Young Frankenstein” is the most inspired of Brooks and Wilder’s films together, with a multitude of hilarious scenes.
But fans were riveted when the laughter turned to tragedy as Radner died of ovarian cancer five years later.
That same year, he appeared in his final film role: “Another You” with Pryor.
He won an Emmy Award in 2003 for his final screen appearance – a guest role on “Will & Grace”. In 2015, he was among the voices in the animated “The Yo Gabba Gabba!”
He soon teamed with Brooks, and Wilder’s comic skills tended to overshadow his work as a director, writer and championship fencer, all of which he displayed in “The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother” (1975). Wilder and Brooks would go on to create some of the movie world’s most memorable films and characters. Wilder later remarried in 1991 and is survived by his second wife Karen.
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“Thank you Gene Wilder for the wonderful, the weird, the pure imagination”.
