Legendary comic and actor Gene Wilder has died at the age of 83.
Gene Wilder was born Jerome Silberman on June 11, 1933, in Stanford, Connecticut. He called himself Gene Wilder professionally from the age of 26 from the Thomas Wolfe character Eugene Grant and novelist Thornton Wilder.
Gene Wilder got his showbiz break in 1963 when he was cast in the production ‘Mother Courage and Her Children, starring Anne Bancroft. Anne was going out with (and would later marry) Mel Brooks who was working on a screenplay ‘Springtime For Hitler’. Brooks cast Wilder in the lead role of his 1968 play ‘The Producers’. The film became a cult comedy and made Gene Wilder a star.
In 1971 Wilder starred in ‘Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory’ but the film was not initially a commercial success but his next movie, Woody Allen’s ‘Everything You Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask)’ was. Wilder then began writing screenplays. His first ‘Young Frankenstein’.
The 80s were huge for Gene Wilder with ‘Stir Crazy’, ‘Hanky Panky’ (where he met his third wife Gilda Radner) and then ‘The Woman In Red’ with Wilder also as the director. Wilder and Richard Pryor then reunited for the hilarious ‘See No Evil, Hear No Evil’.
Gilda Radner died from 1989 from Ovarian Cancer. Wilder remarried Karen Webb a supervisor for the Hard of Hearing. He dedicated his life to promoting cancer awareness and treatment and founded the Gilda Radner Ovarian Cancer Detection Center in Los Angeles and Gilda’s Club, a support group for cancer awareness in New York.
Gene Wilder died on 28 August 2016 at his home in Stamford, Connecticut from complications of Alzheimer’s disease.
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