The frizzy-haired actor was a master at playing panicked characters caught up in schemes that only a madman such as Mel Brooks could devise, whether reviving a monster in “Young Frankenstein” or bilking Broadway in “The Producers”.
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Wilder’s friends, co-workers and admirers were quick to pay tribute to the actor on Monday after the news of his death.
Gene Wilder, the star of films such as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein, died today at the age of 83.
Perhaps Wilder’s most famous role was in Willy Wonka and The Chocolate Factory, where his fantastic portrayal of the titular Wonka helped the film to become a cult classic.
On Monday Gene Wilder died of complications as a result of Alzheimer’s at the age of 83, and he took with him a little piece of the world’s childhood. But Brooks once said he found Wilder “a natural.an Everyman with all the vulnerability showing”.
In an interview at New York’s 92nd Street Y in 2013, Wilder explained how he became disillusioned with the style of films that became popular in Hollywood.
“He blessed every film we did with his magic and he blessed me with his friendship”, Brooks wrote.
“The thing i remember is, all he really wanted to talk about was how my wife and son were adjusting in NY, and were we happy and was it fun”.
Wilder was a Milwaukee native – born Jerome Silberman here in Brew City on June 11th, 1933. They co-starred in four films: “Silver Streak”, “Stir Crazy”, “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” and “Another You”.
Survivors include his fourth wife, Karen Boyer, a speech therapist who taught him to lip-read for his role as a deaf man in See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989). A key break came when he co-starred with Anne Bancroft in Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage” in 1963.
“It is nearly unbearable for us to contemplate our life without him”, his nephew Jordan Walker-Pearlman said in a statement, adding that Wilder was diagnosed with the disease three years ago but kept the condition private so as not to disappoint fans.
Wilder’s performance as the endearingly frantic Leo Bloom in The Producers (1967) kicked off his celebrated collaboration withMel Brooks and garnered him an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor. He won a 2003 Emmy Award for his guest role on the sitcom Will & Grace, playing a quick-to-anger boss. His career gained momentum as he played a swashbuckler in Start the Revolution Without Me (1970), the candy impresario of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) and a sheep-smitten doctor in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex * But Were Afraid to Ask (1972). He peaked in the mid-1970s with the twin Brooks hits “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein”. Wilder pushed for casting Pryor to deflect cries of racism in light of controversial material, such as the scene in Silver Streak in which Wilder applies shoe polish to his face and tries to “act black”.
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Wilder’s third marriage was to “Saturday Night Live” star Gilda Radner in 1984.
