Wilder died Monday at the age of 83 due to complications from Alzheimer’s disease, a diagnosis only revealed after his death.
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Mel Brooks remembered his old friend in a heart touching tweet that read, ‘One of the truly great talents of our time. A true film legend, he elevates every scene and every movie he’s in. “I think I can be in the movies”.
She said Wilder, with “those wonderful blue eyes” was “great to be around” and “very generous”, adding: “He was always keen for other people to have their moment, and really for somebody so. such a mega star, no ego, there was no ego there”.
The son of a Russian Jewish immigrant, Wilder was born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1933.
He began improvising comedy skits as a child to entertain his invalid mother. 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.
Wilder had a small role as the hostage of gangsters in the 1967 classic Bonnie and Clyde, a year before The Producers.
A few years later, Brooks cast Wilder in The Producers, for which Wilder was nominated for a supporting actor Academy Award.
The pair were also in the running for the best adapted screenplay award for Young Frankenstein in 1975. The two met while making the 1982 film “Hanky-Panky” and married in 1984.
He helped found the Gilda Radner Ovarian Cancer Detection Center in Los Angeles and co-founded Gilda’s Club, a support organization that has branches throughout the United States.
“It’s kind of like losing a parent”, Ostrum told Variety. “I didn’t want to say anything because I wanted it to go on”. The pair are trying to make their way to Hollywood, and after amusing performance as a pair of woodpeckers for a bank promotion campaign, they get mistakenly identified as robbers who later rob the same bank.
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Wilder is survived by his wife, Karen, whom he married in 1991, and his daughter from a previous marriage, Katherine, from whom he was estranged.
