Gene Wilder

Gene Wilder, born in 1935, American motion-picture and stage actor, best known for portraying zany characters. Memorable for his curly mop of straw-colored hair, the actor often portrayed sad and sensitive men who were also funny.

Born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he started taking acting lessons as a teenager. Wilder studied drama at the University of Iowa, graduating in 1955 and moving to Bristol, England, for further study. He spent several years in the United States military in the late 1950s. In 1962 he landed his first Broadway role as a confused hotel valet in Graham Greene’s The Complaisant Lover. For this portrayal, Wilder won the Clarence Derwent Award for promising new actors. During the early 1960s he appeared in several more Broadway productions, including One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest in 1963.

In the late 1960s Wilder began acting in films. He had a small role in the critically acclaimed Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and earned an Academy Award nomination for his role as a nervous accountant in The Producers (1968), the first film written and directed by Mel Brooks. Wilder’s whimsical antics and wide-eyed expressions were perfectly suited for Brooks’s style of frantic slapstick comedy. After playing the eccentric owner of a candy factory in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971), Wilder again teamed with Brooks for two parodies in 1974, playing an alcoholic lawman in Blazing Saddles and a mad scientist in Young Frankenstein. He also received an Academy Award nomination as a cowriter for Young Frankenstein.

In 1976 Wilder starred in the film Silver Streak, which also featured comic actor Richard Pryor. Wilder then wrote and directed the comedy The World’s Greatest Lover (1977). In 1980 he teamed with Pryor again, playing a man mistakenly sent to prison in the hit comedy Stir Crazy. Two later films with Pryor—See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989) and Another You (1991)—failed to repeat the duo’s earlier success.

In 1984 Wilder married fellow comedian Gilda Radner. He appeared with Radner in three films: Hanky Panky (1982), The Woman in Red (cowritten and directed by Wilder, 1984), and Haunted Honeymoon (cowritten and directed by Wilder, 1986). In 1989 Radner died from ovarian cancer; after her death Wilder dedicated himself to fundraising for Gilda’s Clubs, support centers for people with cancer.

In 1996 Wilder starred in a British stage production of Neil Simon’s Laughter on the 23rd Floor. Three years later he cowrote and starred in the television movie Murder in a Small Town as a theater director caught up in a homicide case.