Wilder, Gene 1935(?)–

(Jerome Silberman)

PERSONAL:

Born Jerome Silberman, June 11, 1935 (one source lists 1933), in Milwaukee, WI; son of William J. (an importer) and Jeanne Silberman; married Mary Mercier (a playwright and actress), July 22, 1960 (marriage ended); married May Joan Schutz, October 27, 1967 (divorced, 1974); married Gilda Radner (an actress and comedienne), September 18, 1984 (died May 20, 1989); married Karen Boyer (speech therapist), September 8, 1991; children: (first marriage) Katharine Anastasia. Education: University of Iowa, B.A., 1955; studied acting with Herman Gottlieb, 1946-51, at Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, 1955-56, at Herbert Berghof Studio, 1957-59, and at Actors Studio, 1961. Politics: "Liberal Democrat." Hobbies and other interests: Fencing, tennis, bridge.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Ames Cushing, William Morris Agency, 1 William Morris Pl., Beverly Hills, CA 90212.

CAREER:

Actor, director, producer, and writer. Stage appearances include: Twelfth Night and Macbeth, both 1959; Roots and The Complaisant Lover, both 1961; Mother Courage and Her Children and One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, both 1963.

Film appearances include: Bonnie and Clyde and The Producers, both 1967; Start the Revolution without Me, 1968; Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx (also known as Fun Loving), 1970; Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, 1971; Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, 1972; Rhinoceros, Blazing Saddles, 1973; The Little Prince, and Young Frankenstein, both 1974; The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes's Smarter Brother, 1975; Silver Streak, 1976; The World's Greatest Lover, 1977; The Frisco Kid (also known as No Knife), 1979; Stir Crazy, 1980; Sunday Lovers, 1980; Hanky-Panky, 1982; The Woman in Red, 1984; Haunted Honeymoon, 1986; See No Evil, Hear No Evil, 1989; Funny about Love, 1990; Another You, 1991; Instant Karma, 2005; and Over the Hedge (voice), 2006.

Television appearances include guest on series' Play of the Week, 1961, Dupont Show of the Week, The Twentieth Century, and The Defenders, all 1962; Eternal Light, 1966; The Electric Company, 1972-77; Something Wilder, 1994; and Will and Grace, 2002-03. Guest on television specials Death of a Salesman, 1966; The Trouble with People, 1972; The Scarecrow, 1972; Marlo Thomas in Acts of Love—And Other Comedies, 1973; Annie and the Hoods and Thursday's Game, both 1974; Baryshnikov in Hollywood, 1982; The Lady in Question, 1999; and Alice in Wonderland, 1999. Star of television series Eligible Dentist, National Broadcasting System (NBC-TV), 1993.

Worked variously as chauffeur, toy salesperson, and fencing instructor. Fencing choreographer for Twelfth Night and Macbeth at Cambridge Drama Festival, 1959. Cofounded Gilda Radner Ovarian Detection Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. Member of Actors Studio, 1961—. Military service: U.S. Army, 1956-58.

MEMBER:

Actors' Equity Association, American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, Director's Guild, Writer's Guild.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Clarence Derwent Award, Clarence Derwent Award Trust, 1962, for The Complaisant Lover; Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, 1968, for The Producers; Academy Award nomination (with Mel Brooks) for best screenplay adapted from other material, 1974, for Young Frankenstein.

WRITINGS:

SCREENPLAYS

(With Mel Brooks) Young Frankenstein, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1974.

(And director) The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes's Smarter Brother, Twentieth Century-Fox, 1975.

(And director) The World's Greatest Lover, Paramount, 1977.

(Writer and director of "Skippy" segment) Sunday Lovers, Viaduc-Medusa, 1980.

(And director) The Woman in Red (adapted from Jean Loup Deabadie and Yves Robert's screenplay Pardon Mon Affair), Orion, 1984.

(With Terence Marsh; and director) Haunted Honeymoon, Orion, 1986.

(With Earl Barret, Arne Sultan, Eliot Wald, and Andrew Kurtzman) See No Evil, Hear No Evil, TriStar, 1989.

OTHER

(With M. Steven Piver) Gilda's Disease: Sharing Personal Experience with a Medical Perspective on Ovarian Cancer, Prometheus Books (Amherst, NY), 1996.

Kiss Me like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art (memoir), St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2005.

My French Whore: A Love Story (novel), St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2007.

ADAPTATIONS:

Young Frankenstein was novelized by Gilbert Pearlman for Ballantine Books, 1974.

SIDELIGHTS:

Gene Wilder is a prominent actor, director, producer, and writer of film comedies and, later in life, books. While a student at the University of Iowa in the early 1950s, he appeared in various school performances and summer-stock productions. After graduat- ing from Iowa in 1955, he moved to England and entered the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, where he further developed his acting skills. After returning to the United States and completing a stint in the U.S. Army, Wilder continued his acting studies at the Herbert Berghof Studio and, eventually, the Actors Studio. In 1961 he appeared as a buffoon in an Off-Broadway production of Arnold Wesker's Roots. Later that year he made his Broadway debut as a befuddled valet in Graham Green's comic play The Complaisant Lover. For the latter work, Wilder received the Clarence Derwent Award.

During the next few years Wilder appeared in a variety of stage productions, including One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, a Broadway production derived from Ken Kesey's novel. In 1967 he won his first film role, playing an unnerved undertaker in director Arthur Penn's classic gangster work, Bonnie and Clyde. During the next year, 1968, Wilder won widespread acclaim for his performance as an edgy accountant in Mel Brooks's movie The Producers, a comedy in which various madcaps launch an unlikely musical titled Springtime for Hitler. For his performance in The Producers, Wilder earned an Academy award nomination for best supporting actor. During the next several years he continued to gain distinction as an accomplished motion picture comic with a flair for combustible anxiety. Notable are his roles in such works as Start the Revolution without Me, where he plays dissimilar twins serving both sides during the French Revolution; Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, in which he plays a quirky candymaker; and Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Sex but Were Afraid to Ask, where he portrays a doctor who has a love affair with a sheep.

Wilder teamed again with Brooks on the 1973 film Blazing Saddles, a spoof of the Western genre. Wilder plays a drunken gunfighter, the Waco Kid, who bands with an unlikely lawman, an urbane African American named Bart, to rid a town of swindling businessmen. The next year, Wilder and Brooks continued their collaboration with the motion picture Young Frankenstein, a lampoon of the classic horror films of the 1930s and Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein, from which the film partially derives its title. This work, which Wilder and Brooks wrote together, features Wilder as a descendent of the deranged Dr. Frankenstein in Shelley's narrative, who, generations earlier, created a live human being from the parts of corpses. In the film, Wilder's character is a successful young doctor who learns that he has inherited the Transylvania estate of his resurrecting ancestor. He journeys to Transylvania and takes up residence in the atmospheric mansion. This young Frankenstein eventually discovers his grandfather's lab and soon realizes that his relative's crazy experiments could work. He succeeds in duplicating his ancestor's feat, but, predictably, his feat goes awry, although the repercussions here are of a comedic, rather than horrific, nature. Shot with black and white film and using the original laboratory sets from director James Whales's 1931 film Frankenstein, Wilder and Brooks created a film that, while a satire of the genre, is also a loving tribute to the look and style of Hollywood's early fright films.

In critical and commercial terms, Young Frankenstein was both Brooks's and Wilder's greatest success. The film was a box-office hit and was almost uniformly praised by critics. In the years following its release, the film achieved cult status and is regarded as one of the funniest pictures of the late twentieth century. "The script is crammed with witty lines, double entendres, puns, and a few well-placed bits of slapstick," appraised a reviewer for the Motion Picture Guide, who also called the film "a marvelous piece of work" and stated that "Wilder gives one of his best performances as the doctor."

With Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, both of which won widespread recognition as superior comedies, Wilder established himself as a leading comedic performer. He followed these achievements with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes's Smarter Brother, a film which he both wrote and directed as well as starred in. In this comedy, Wilder appears as Sigerson Holmes, the unstable brother of celebrated crime-solver Sherlock Holmes. Unlike his more accomplished sibling, Sigerson is incapable of sustained thought and profound observation. Rather, he is motivated purely by the desire to exceed his brother as a sleuth. That desire, in turn, leads him into considerable danger.

As an actor, Wilder scored another success with the film Silver Streak, a romantic comedy in which a mild-mannered executive—played by Wilder—finds romance and intrigue while traveling aboard a train. Although much of the film concerns the developing attraction between the executive and an art professor's assistant (played by Jill Clayburgh), many felt the film's highlights are actually those scenes pairing Wilder's character with a bewildered, but nonetheless resourceful, con man portrayed by comedian Richard Pryor. Among the pair's comedic scenes is one in which Wilder's character disguises himself as a rambunctious black man and, coached on how to act hip and cool by Pryor's character, passes through a train station cornered off by police searching for the two men.

Wilder's next achievement was acting in, writing, directing, and producing The World's Greatest Lover, a comic film set in the times of silent motion pictures. This work portrays Wilder as neurotic baker Rudy Valentine who aspires to become the next great screen lover, like his wife's idol Rudolf Valentino. During his pursuit of film stardom, Rudy encounters a host of buffoons and cretins, including a group of movie studio executives whose only uniform motivation is to agree with whatever their manic superior says. Meanwhile, Rudy's wife has gone in search of Valentino, with the hopes of being seduced by the legendary Hollywood Lothario. Both husband and wife come to realize, on the cusp of achieving their individual fantasies, that their love for each other is what truly matters. New York Times reviewer Vincent Canby reported that The World's Greatest Lover is "frequently side-splitting." Canby also appraised Wilder's work as being "full of intelligent associations" and termed the film's look as "uncommonly handsome."

Wilder was paired again with Pryor in the 1980 movie Stir Crazy, a comedy about two stooges whose blunders land them in prison. Although the film—written by Bruce Jay Friedman and directed by Sidney Poitier—was received as somewhat lowbrow fare, it nonetheless scored substantially at the box office. This success, in turn, was largely attributed to the comedic rapport between Wilder and Pryor, particularly noticeable in prison sequences wherein the hapless duo desperately endeavor to affirm their masculinity to hardened criminals.

Throughout the remainder of the 1980s, Wilder's film career fluctuated. In 1982 he was paired with actress and comedienne Gilda Radner in Hanky-Panky, a romantic comedy in which Wilder's character must solve a murder that he is unjustly accused of committing. The film was largely dismissed as an unsatisfying mix of suspense and humor, and the Wilder-Radner teaming was generally decried as unfulfilling and even unfunny. From a personal standpoint, the film was a success for both Wilder and Radner; the two fell in love during production and were married in 1984.

After completing Hanky-Panky, Wilder wrote and directed The Woman in Red, a comedy—derived from Jean Loup Deabadie and Yves Robert's French film Pardon Mon Affair—about a happily married man, played by Wilder, who suddenly finds himself obsessed with a gorgeous stranger. Most critics described The Woman in Red as dull and somewhat uninspired, but some reviewers expressed praise for the performance of Wilder's Hanky-Panky partner Radner, who appears in a supporting role as a misled coworker.

Wilder and Radner continued their screen partnership with Haunted Honeymoon, a comedy written, directed, and produced by Wilder. The duo play fellow radio actors and lovers who decide to spend a restorative weekend at an ancestral home, where they encounter an odd assortment of Wilder's relatives. This film, like Hanky-Panky and The Woman in Red, fared rather poorly with most critics.

In 1989 Wilder regained a measure of success with See No Evil, Hear No Evil, in which he appears as a deaf man named Dave opposite Richard Pryor's blind character, Wally. The two figures run afoul of both the law and criminal elements when they are the sole witnesses to a murder. Incarcerated by the police and pursued by the real murderers, the two must unite to survive and prove their innocence. Despite their characters' handicaps, Wilder and Pryor were praised for not playing Dave and Wally as meek, endearing figures. Rather, the duo are like most normal people, susceptible to personality quirks and unlovable behavior. Dave, for example, responds sarcastically when he detects others slowing their speech for him. Pryor's Wally, on the other hand, refuses to acknowledge his blindness in the hopes that he will attain a better station in life if people believe him to be sighted. His plans inevitably fail when he walks into walls or picks fights with combative voices that are not directed at him. New York reviewer David Denby reported that "the [pair's] battling orneriness checks our tears, and this drying out saves the movie." Canby praised both actors for their characterizations in the New York Times, and, while acknowledging the film's cantankerous leads and foul language, stated that "it would be difficult to imagine a more benign or entertaining mass-market movie."

Wilder reunited with Pryor in the 1991 comedy Another You, their fourth joint venture. Wilder's character is a pathological liar released from a mental institution and into the care of a street hustler (Pryor) who has been ordered to provide community service. Unfortunately, Another You failed to match the comedic quality of the screen pair's prior works. As Variety reviewer Joseph McBride remarked, the film differs significantly from their "earlier, uproarious teamings."

By 1986, when Haunted Honeymoon was released, Wilder and Gilda Radner had already been married for two years. They would not work again in film, however, because Radner fell ill with ovarian cancer and died in 1989. In the ensuing years Wilder has devoted himself substantially to promoting cancer research. In 1991, for instance, he testified before a Congressional subcommittee and called for greater public awareness and testing. He also helped establish the Gilda Radner Ovarian Detection Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. "I've learned a lot about ovarian cancer since Gilda died," Wilder disclosed in a People interview, adding: "We have to learn from the past, from the mistakes. I'm hoping in some small way to help the other Gildas out there."

Furthering his cancer awareness crusade, Wilder teamed up with Dr. M. Steven Piver, a cancer surgeon, to coauthor his first book, 1996's Gilda's Disease: Sharing Personal Experience with a Medical Perspective on Ovarian Cancer. The book delves into the causes of ovarian cancer, preventive measures, and treatment options, ranging from surgical to alternative therapies. Wilder gives the book a personal touch by talking about Radner and their struggles with the disease. "Readers will experience both emotional and rational perspectives," wrote Manfred Kroger in a review of the book for Nutrition Forum.

Wilder's second book, Kiss Me like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art, was published in 2005. "Readers looking for a little comic relief will be disappointed by this thoughtfully serious memoir," cautioned Booklist reviewer Margaret Flanagan. Wilder's memoir was described "as frank and raw as a session with a shrink," by Washington Post contributor David Segal. He added that the book is "filled with blunt musings about sex, acting and the search for love and happiness." Wilder contemplated creating his memoirs for some time, but it was not until a trip to California with his fourth wife, Karen Boyer, to take care of her sick mother that he started writing it. The title of the book actually came from Radner, "one of the many friends, lovers and colleagues about whom he writes with striking candor," according to Janet Maslin in a review of the book for the New York Times Book Review. Not only does he write candidly about his friends and lovers, but he also openly discusses his own neuroses (such as his compulsion to pray for hours on end while his mother was ill) and his bout with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. "The book is far more hug-and-ponder than kiss-and-tell. Wilder comes across as a sensitive and damaged man who spends years trying to figure out how to enjoy himself," remarked Segal.

With two books under his belt, Wilder tackled his first novel, 2007's My French Whore: A Love Story, described by a Publishers Weekly reviewer as a "simple, straight-faced love story." The novel is set in 1918 near the end of World War I, as Paul Peachy, train conductor and amateur actor, decides to escape a loveless marriage by joining the U.S. Army. Peachy is soon sent off to the trenches in France. Born of German immigrants, Peachy speaks fluent German, so, when the infamous German spy Harry Stroller is caught, Peachy is brought in to interrogate him. Peachy flees the Army after witnessing two of his friends killed in battle and he is subsequently captured by German troops. To save himself from being executed, Peachy pretends to be Stroller, using information from his interrogation session with the spy to pull off the masquerade. Under his new identity, Peachy is whisked off to headquarters, where he meets Colonel Steinig and young French prostitute Annie Breton, the latter with whom he eventually falls in love. Because Peachy is unwilling to leave Annie, it is only a matter of time before his clever ruse is revealed, with tragic results. "Wilder's fiction debut, reads like a breeze," commended Library Journal contributor Ron Terpening.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Motion Picture Guide, Volume 9, Cinebooks, 1987, pp. 3973-3974

Wilder, Gene, Kiss Me like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2005.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 15, 1996, Whitney Scott, review of Gilda's Disease: Sharing Personal Experience with a Medical Perspective on Ovarian Cancer, p. 195; March 15, 2005, Margaret Flanagan, review of Kiss Me like a Stranger, p. 1256.

Entertainment Weekly, March 18, 2005, Scott Brown, review of Kiss Me like a Stranger, p. 72; March 16, 2007, review of My French Whore: A Love Story, p. 75.

Kirkus Reviews, January 1, 2005, review of Kiss Me like a Stranger, p. 46; October 1, 2006, review of My French Whore, p. 987.

Library Journal, March 1, 2005, Barry X. Miller, review of Kiss Me like a Stranger, p. 89; March 1, 2007, Ron Terpening, review of My French Whore, p. 79.

New York, May 22, 1989, David Denby, review of See No Evil, Hear No Evil, p. 71.

New York Times, December 19, 1977, Vincent Canby, review of The World's Greatest Lover, p. 44; May 12, 1989, Vincent Canby, review of See No Evil, Hear No Evil.

New York Times Book Review, March 7, 2005, Janet Maslin, review of Kiss Me like a Stranger.

Nutrition Forum, January 1, 1998, Manfred Kroger, review of Gilda's Disease: Sharing Personal Experiences and a Medical Perspective on Ovarian Cancer, p. 8.

People, June 3, 1991, interview with Wilder, pp. 76-82.

Publishers Weekly, January 24, 2005, review of Kiss Me like a Stranger, p. 230; October 2, 2006, review of My French Whore, p. 35.

Variety, August 5, 1991, Joseph McBride, review of Another You; April 4, 2005, Lisa D. Horowitz, review of Kiss Me like a Stranger, p. 70.

Washington Post, March 28, 2005, David Segal, review of Kiss Me like a Stranger, p. C01; October 2, 2006, review of My French Whore, p. 35.

ONLINE

Gene Wilder Home Page,http://www.genewilder.net (June 12, 2007).