Say his name and you’re likely to conjure up any number of images. Young Frankenstein. Willy Wonka. Leo Bloom of Bialystock & Bloom. Gene Wilder has been a fixture of moviegoers’ memories for decades, and this month, TCM honors him and his work with Role Model: Gene Wilder. In an extensive interview, Alec Baldwin engages Wilder about his storied career. The tribute also will include screenings of two of Wilder’s most famed collaborations with writer/director Mel Brooks, The Producers (1968) and Blazing Saddles.
We couldn’t wait for Role Model, so both to promote it and celebrate Wilder ourselves, we got in touch and arranged an interview to promote the forthcoming interview. Not surprisingly, the soft-spoken Wilder was genial and happy to entertain a thoughtful discussion about his life and career, and how his work has evolved over the years.
Though his film career didn’t start to blossom until the late ’60s, Wilder’s acting career started when he was just 13. In spite of his eventual reputation as a comic actor onscreen, the young Wilder started out in the world of serious drama, studying method acting for years under the tutelage of Herbert Berghof and Uta Hagen, at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School as well as at the Actors Studio. It didn’t all go so well. “At 15,” he recalls, “I was so influenced by Stanislavsky and units and objectives, obstacles, actions, main objective, immediate objective, conditions — all those things that are taught. And I used to think that, before I went on to do a scene when it was my turn … ‘If only I could find the right words for my objective, I’d be a better actor,’ which is almost — I won’t say insane. It’s so dumb that I felt sorry for the poor schmuck who saw it.”
Eventually, Wilder got wise, with a bit of help from friend, the young Charles Grodin. “We were both on unemployment in those days,” Wilder recalls. “He had been studying at the same place, but then he switched to Lee Strasbourg. And I said, ‘What does Mr. Strasbourg say about units and objectives, actions and conditions?’ He said, ‘I’ve been their four and a half years and I’ve never heard him mention those things.’ I said, ‘That’s the guy for me.’
With Strasbourg, it all came together for Wilder, and he was on his way. “That was the real turning point, for me,” he says. “I used to want to do Shakespeare and Death of a Salesman. But I wanted to be, in a sense, a Stanislavsky actor who does comedy. I mean, that is to say, believable comedy, where the character is alive and thinking, and has a heart. And the actions he takes are funny. But otherwise, everything is real the way it would be in Death of a Salesman or Hamlet, or wherever.”
Ironically, right before finding his niche as a comic actor in films, he had the dramatic experience of a lifetime performing in Death of a Salesman for television. It’s a production that had special meaning for him. “I did it in high school when I was 16, after I’d seen Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnick on Broadway,” he remembers. “My first Broadway show. I went with my sister — I was in a stock company then, off for the first time in, oh, I think it was called Pleasantville, NY. Afterwards, after eight weeks there, I came to New York and saw Death of a Salesman, and 14 years later, I did Death of a Salesman with Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnick on the two-hour CBS special.”
Soon afterward, things began to snowball for Wilder. After a brief but memorable scene as a nervous, newlywed undertaker in 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, Wilder found himself on the fast track to fame. The first of several collaborations with Mel Brooks, The Producers teamed him with Zero Mostel as an odd couple of sorts who put on a deliberately awful Broadway show in order to bilk investors out of their millions. Eventually, it became enough of a classic that Brooks revisited it as a proper Broadway musical in 2001.
Wilder admits not knowing what to think about the live production, at first. “I thought, ‘I don’t know how they’re going to pull this off,'” he says. But “after Nathan Lane came out and he performed his first number for about three minutes, I relaxed. I said, ‘There’s nothing to worry about.’ And I liked it a lot. … But you see, that was Mel’s kind of comedy. That was Borscht Belt comedy. That’s what he does. That’s what he did. That’s what he’s a master at. How it would be translated into 18 to 22 songs I didn’t know, but most of them were very good. And he won awards up the kazoo, for that.”
The Producers ended up being remade on film in its new Broadway incarnation, but it was the designs Brooks had on similarly resetting Young Frankenstein as a musical that had Wilder most concerned. “Of all the things I’ve done, the most perfectly realized — and my favorite — was Young Frankenstein,” Wilder explains, unabashedly. “I had tried to talk him out of it. Two years ago, I said, ‘You’re a genius at the Borscht Belt comedy. That’s what you know, and why The Producers [worked]. But when I wrote Young Frankenstein, it wasn’t that kind of comedy at all, and the showstopper, ‘Puttin’ on the Ritz,’ is going to be surrounded by 20 or 22 other musical numbers.’ And he argued and yelled, and I said, ‘Let’s stop. Call me next week. You think about what I said. I’ll think about what you said.’ And we hung up.”
Wilder and Brooks have been through a lot, both professionally and personally. Together and apart, they’ve made audiences howl with laughter. But both also have very publicly shared the agony of losing a beloved wife to cancer: Wilder lost Gilda Radner in 1989; Anne Bancroft, Brooks’ late wife, succumbed in 2005 — at roughly the time Brooks was beginning to work up Young Frankenstein for Broadway. Knowing well the pain Brooks was enduring at the time, Wilder carefully reconsidered his protectiveness of the script he and Brooks had cowrote. “I did think about what he said, and I also thought that now that his wife, Anne Bancroft, was gone — ‘He needs to work. And if he’s going to do it, I want him to go about it with a happy heart, not a heavy heart.’ So when he called back the next week, he started right in where we left off, yelling … and I just said, ‘Stop talking. I want you to do it.’ And he said, ‘You’re a saint.’ I said, ‘I don’t want to be a saint. I just want you to be happy.’ So he went about his business, and he did it. It occupied him for, I don’t know, a year and a half, at least. And that was good. Kept his mind off [of his loss.]”
Sorrow has tempered a lot of the sweetness in Wilder’s own life. In recent years, he prevailed in his own battle with cancer, in part because he feels the trials of his life had prepared him for it. “I mean, a lot depends on your mama and your daddy,” he offers, “and how you were raised. How tough a time — how much confidence you had. I did have a tough time, but the period when Gilda was so ill? That was tough. Much tougher than what I went through, but by the time I went through it, I was so content with what I did have that the thought of dying wasn’t on my mind. It was not being with my wife, Karen — that was on my mind.”
According to Wilder, it took a long time after Radner’s death before he was able to marry again. It wasn’t until 1991 that he finally married speech pathologist and former actor Karen Boyer. “We’re married for 16 years, now, and I can say honestly that I’m still in love,” he says. ” And so every day is a happy day, as long as she’s well and I’m well — healthy, I mean. … I came out of [recovery from non-Hodgkins lymphoma] healthier than I was before, I think. [I received a] stem-cell transplant. I was very fortunate. So I try to appreciate each day.”
These days, Wilder’s routine is much different than it used to be — and it would take a lot to get him to go back to the way things were at the height of his fame. “I didn’t want to go back on Broadway,” he says. “I’ve been asked a lot of times, but apart from eight performances a week, two matinees — which is really tough — well, I didn’t want to do Broadway anymore, unless it was a very limited run.” His enthusiasm for returning to the film world is even more diminished. “In the movies, the things that I [eventually] was seeing — and that I was offered — were of such a different quality than anything that I loved when I was starting out. They weren’t making films like that anymore. They weren’t writing films like that anymore. And I didn’t want to write [films] anymore — take five or six months to write a script and hope that someone will do it. I was lucky. I think I wrote eight films that were produced. But I acted in them, so I had a certain privilege, in that sense. I don’t mean this to sound silly, but I don’t like show business. I like show. But I don’t like the business. And if there were things that were, when the bell goes off after 25 pages, that would be different. But I haven’t had any bells going off. I’ve read some scripts that I’ve liked, but they weren’t good for me. And others that I was good for, but I didn’t want to do them. I didn’t care for the script. I thought they were just OK. And if I were going to go back to acting in films, I want it to be more than OK.”
These days, Wilder’s routine centers more on writing for readers rather than as a means to another end. Since writing his memoirs, he’s taken two forays into the world of fiction. His first novel, My French Whore — based in part on his own early days as an actor in Milwaukee repertory theater — already has stirred some interest in Hollywood. “My old boss, Alan Ladd Jr., wants to do it as a movie,” he explains, though with a bit of caution. It’s obviously not a world he wants to re-enter. “We’re just trying to find the right director, but I don’t want to have anything to do with — just approval of director and the two characters.”
If Wilder is cautious, it’s for a simple reason: “I find that I prefer writing to anything having to do with the movies, now,” he says, matter-of-factly, before quietly announcing that his latest novel, The Woman Who Wouldn’t, has just been released. “I loved writing that. I can be at home. I write from about 10:30, quarter to 11, to about quarter to 4, 4:00, and I can come out, give my wife a kiss and have a cup of tea, go back in and write some more. It’s a different way of … you know, the writing — my wife and I also paint — but the writing, the painting, the acting? I believe it all comes from one reservoir, and you’re just showing different aspects of your heart, no matter which medium you’re doing, you’re good at, you love. And I do believe that. So if I’m not acting, then I’m writing. If I’m not writing, then I’m painting, but it’s still just expressing something of the heart. That’s what I care about.”
Role Model: Gene Wilder premieres on TCM April 15.