Remembering Gene Wilder
Gene Wilder couldn’t have chosen a better stage name. “Gene” is so ordinary, so sane. It promises gentleness: genial, congeniality. But Wilder? That’s the sort of actor who could play Leo Bloom, Willy Wonka, Dr. Frankenstein’s grandson, or The Waco Kid.
Sure enough, from his breakout role as Bloom, the accountant who gets pulled into a criminal scheme opposite Zero Mostel’s Max Bialystock in “The Producers,” through his Emmy-winning supporting performance as Mr. Stein on TV’s “Will & Grace” in 2003 (after which he retired), his performances blended gentleness, volatility, and a romantic spirit. He was mesmerizing whether starring in classics like “The Producers,” “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” “Young Frankenstein” and “Blazing Saddles” or misfires like “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” or his self-directed “The Woman in Red.” He was calm and chaos, reason and madness. He made you believe in whatever he was doing on screen, no matter how preposterous. He had that gift.
His personal life was marked by tragedy. Born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and dropped into cinema via theater in the late 1960s, he lost his mother to ovarian cancer at 23 when he was serving in the Army, and his wife Gilda Radner to the same disease decades later. He remarried (to Karen Webb a clinical supervisor for the New York League for the Hard of Hearing who advised Wilder on his performance as a deaf man in “See No Evil, Hear No Evil”), battled non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma into remission with chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant, but died of complications from Alzheimer’s disease in 2016.
“Remembering Gene Wilder” covers this and more, though not too much more. It’s patchy and digressive, and the overreliance on syrupy music becomes off-putting towards the end. But fans of the actor will probably enjoy it, because it’s a chance to appreciate the life and art of a remarkable talent whose period of superstardom was actually much briefer than we might have realized.
Wilder’s glory years were roughly 1968-1980, a stretch bracketed by “The Producers” and his biggest box-office success “Stir Crazy” (opposite Richard Pryor, with whom he made five features). After the one-two box office punch of “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein” in the same year (Wilder co-wrote the script to the latter and was Oscar-nominated) he decided to go the route of his pal Brooks by writing and directing his own star vehicles, starting with “The Adventure of Sherlock Holmes’ Smarter Brother” and “The World’s Greatest Lover.”
But the productions were a mixed bag, and the movies he made for other directors tended to be worse and less intriguingly personal. By the ‘90s it became clear that he was the sort of acquired taste that audiences wouldn’t automatically come out to see. After losing Radner and then his friend and comedy teammate Pryor (to multiple sclerosis) Wilder started to lose interest in acting and filmmaking, and by the end of his life concentrated mostly on writing novels and nonfiction, painting watercolors and tap-dancing with Webb, and raising money for cancer awareness and treatment in honor of Radner.
