Happy Birthday, Gene Wilder!
Today is Gene Wilder's 73rd birthday. One of America's greatest comic actors, he hasn't done much in front of the cameras in the past decade. He's been writing, living relatively peacefully with a wife he adores, occasionally appearing in a feature article somewhere. He beat cancer a couple years ago after fighting it for years. He has aged as he acted, as he lived, as he pratfalled: gracefully.
Of course, Wilder isn't his real name. He was born Jerome Silberman. He named himself after Thornton Wilder, but it might as well have been another; he shares his sophisticated silliness and profoundly serious levity with Billy Wilder's best movies. Unlike his early directors Mel Brooks and Woody Allen, he wasn't a stand-up comic or a Borsht Belt cutup. Leo Bloom, Frederic Frankenstein, and Willy Wonka were hilarious, but even in their neuroses they were elegant.
His first leading role came in Mel Brooks's The Producers as Leo Bloom, a young, conscience-striken accountant who found joy in life after being benevolently corrupted by Zero Mostel's Max Bialystok. It was Brooks's debut and greatest movie, and Wilder's performance is surprisingly affecting, by turns manic ("I'm in pain! And I'm wet! And I'm still hysterical!") and moving, as when he and Max dance by the fountains at Lincoln Center to the tune of Gershwin. ("I want everything I've ever seen in the movies!")
His secret weapon was his complete sincerity, which made it possible for audiences to believe he had fallen in love with a sheep in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), possible to trust the mercurial and winkingly dangerous Willy Wonka, or to sympathize with the ego-mad Frankenstein, who goes from a life of trying to live down his name to an attempt to live up to it by creating life and teaching it to tapdance. He committed to his roles, never mocked them. No matter how silly his characters were, they always believed in themselves.
That sincerity came pouring out in his recent memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art, a large portion of which was devoted to his relationship with the brilliant, troubled Gilda Radner, his third wife, who died of ovarian cancer in 1989. Radner was one of the great comic actresses of all time, but a difficult, unbalanced, insecure woman. After she died, he founded Gilda's Club, a cancer support group, and partially retired from acting; he has only appeared in two big-screen movies since her death. His memoir suggests he may have started comedy as a way to please his invalid mother, and he seems to have largely dispensed with it following the death of another woman he cared for.
Wilder's golden movie touch evaporated in the 1980's, as he made a number of movies with Richard Pryor and more with Gilda, but few worth remembering. (Pryor's movie career is a shame worth a treatise; one of the most gifted comedians ever, he never made a single great movie.) In 1995, he appeared in a short-lived, little-loved sitcom called Something Wilder. Since then, he has made a few cameos on sitcoms and a few made for TV movies. Mostly he's written books, his memoir and a couple novels, both period pieces, which (like his memoir) have names suggesting relationships with women: My French Whore and The Woman Who Wouldn't.
Nowadays, he's not going out of his way to make other people laugh. A Washington Post interviewer writes, "There's hardly a yuk in Kiss Me, and throughout a 45-minute interview, he says nothing intended to amuse." But that's alright. A septuagenarian owes his audience nothing more. He has earned the right to a second act of quiet straightforwardness, having already given us a lifetime's worth of laughs, and the right to a happy home life after surviving a wife lost to cancer and then facing it himself.
Like many of the great Jewish actors and comedians -- and many other Jews not blessed with talent -- Wilder invested his characters with the neuroses he himself felt, but he did so humanely. At the height of his powers, he mastered the screen like few before or since. His great movies will last forever, a gentle smile on his face as he extends his arms to the audience, wearing a purple velvet suit.
Happy birthday, Gene. May you live to 120.
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Happy Birthday Mr. Wilder, thank you for all the fun over these years.
It would be remiss not to have a few more words added about Gene's marriage to Gilda Radner. She was, in the opinion of many, the greatest female comic of all time, perhaps attributable to her varied neuroses. He obviously loved her very deeply and the awful way she suffered from ovarian cancer and ultimately died (in a coma, following sedation for a hysterically dreaded CAT scan) really laid him low. Many of the SNL family, where she starred so spectacularly for 5 years shared his grief.
It is great to learn that he survived that loss and sails on into his senior years apparently happily. Welcome to geezerdom, Gene; it ain't so bad unless you try running for president. lol
One of Radner's rivals for the title of greatest female comic, and another of Wilder's frequent co-stars, was Madeline Kahn. Like Radner, she died of ovarian cancer. (She was also Jewish.) She doesn't get talked about much these days, perhaps because one of her greatest comic achievements was a dead-on impersonation of Marlene Dietrich -- which isn't exactly a cultural touchstone for kids under 25.
Kahn hosted Saturday Night Live twice while Radner was still on the show, and it was a rare comedic pleasure to watch the two together, Radner performing her famous Barbara Walters impression ("Baba Wawa") and Kahn doing Dietrich, both dropping their r's and mugging like hell. It wasn't well-written and was about as one-trick a pony as SNL has ever done, but simply to watch the two women was to see a comedy master class. Their entire lives, they gave the lie to the inane contention that women aren't funny. They were two of the all-time greats, and they are deeply missed.
Happy Birthday, Mr. Wilder. You never fail to make me laugh. Best to you and your family!
happy b-day, gene! thank you for giving the world the gift that keeps on giving: laughter.
and thank goodness someone here has already mentioned one of my wilder favorites: "start the revolution without me." if you want to talk sheep, give that one a look-see for one of the many hilarious scenes. i don't think i've seen the film since it was first released in the theaters, but at the time, it was very funny (all that and orson welles, too....)
as for the washington post interviewer who expected a comedian, apparently, when he interviewed gene - gene is a comic actor, not a stand up comedian.
we miss you in films, gene!
Happy Birthday Gene Wilder!!!
Nothing compares to his role of Willie Wonka and from my youth till today he remains one of my all-time favorite characters and Wilder, invariably, as one of my personal heroes. I love cinema and actually do not like musicals but Wilder's Wonka was simply brilliant and immortal.
Oh and I beg to differ on the Pryor comment about not making any good movies...he may not have made "Citizen Kane" but which comedian did? However, there's a a few hidden gems if you care to look...start with 'Stir Crazy' and then maybe "Silver Streak". Wilder and Pryor had a natural chemistry and were a delight to watch on screen.
Silver Streak and its follow-ups like Stir Crazy had their moments. But I wouldn't say they're great movies. They're awfully dated in places, much more so than Wilder's classics with Mel Brooks, like The Producers, Young Frankenstein, and Blazing Saddles.
Of course, Pryor co-wrote on the screenplay for Blazing Saddles... so at least he's got that. Oh, and an unbelievable stand-up career fully documented in many highly rated live movies, which coincidentally he wrote all of!
To the article's author above though, thank you for an excellent tribute to Gene, you are quite obviously a fan.
To Gene... Happy birthday! And we're all willing to wait until you hit your "Comedy 80s" before you start to crank out the next batch of gold.
I adored Gene and his gentle, lunatic humour too. Thank you for the tears of laughter and the happy memories. May you have many happy years ahead.
I adore Gene too. He's one of life's quiet comics, and utterly brilliant. Happy Birthday Gene. Many, many more to come. May they all be as happy as you have made me!
More love for Gene Wilder here as well. I always thought he embodied his characters in such a way that you could only imagine him in the part whatever it was. IThe remake of Willy Wonka proves that following Gene isn't a smart thing to do. There is a gentleness in his performances that are sadly lacking His Franenstein is a good example of that quality. Here is a larger than life figure who is all too human even at his most crazy. I think it was TMC that recently had a great interview with Wilder conducted by Alec Baldwin. If you can find it, it's a great look into Wilder's life as an actor, and how he progressed throughout his career.
Thanks for this wonderful tribute to a great man and a great comedic actor.
Silver Streak, Young Frankenstein, Start the Revolution Without Me, Blazing Saddles and many of his other movies will always be among my favorites. Thinking of him as a French nobleman on horseback with a dead falcon affixed to his arm in Start the Revolution Without Me never fails to bring a smile to my face. I was sad when he stopped making feature movies, but he crammed enough brilliance into the ones he did make to satisfy any reasonable connoiseur of fine comedy.
Apart from a David Sedaris audio collection, Kiss Me like a Stranger is the only audio book I own. His voice has such a unique and endearing quality that I knew I'd be imagining his voice while reading the book anyway, and decided to go with the real thing.
He is clearly someone who has always understood that his movies and his fame were separate from his real life, and as much as I still want to see him displaying his immense talent in movies, I'm kind of glad that he knew when to let go and do the other things he felt drawn to, rather than just continuing to do what had become expected of him.
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