Legendary comedy actor Gene Wilder passed away this week after a three-year struggle with Alzheimer's disease. In a statement, the Wilder family explained the comedians' decision to withhold news of his condition from the public, saying it "wasn't vanity, but more so that the countless young children that would call out to him 'There's Willy Wonka,' would not then have to be exposed to an adult referencing illness or trouble and causing delight to travel to worry, disappointment or confusion. He simply couldn't bear the idea of one less smile in the world." Here, we look back at the comedy great's most iconic roles, beginning with one of his many collaborations with Mel Brooks, the horror-comedy Young Frankenstein.
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Perhaps none of Wilder's roles became as iconic and beloved as Willa Wonka, for which Wilder earned a Golden Globe nomination. According to letters between Wilder and his director, Mel Stuart, Wilder's iconic entrance as Wonka was entirely his idea: "When I make my first entrance, I'd like to come out of the door carrying a cane and then walk toward the crowd with a limp," he wrote, as a condition for his accepting the role. "After the crowd sees Willy Wonka is a cripple, they all whisper to themselves and then become deathly quiet. As I walk toward them, my cane sinks into one of the cobblestones I'm walking on and stands straight up, by itself; but I keep on walking, until I realize that I no longer have my cane. I start to fall forward, and just before I hit the ground, I do a beautiful forward somersault and bounce back up, to great applause."
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As recovering alcoholic gunslinger Jim in Mel Brooks' Western satire Blazing Saddles, Wilder chewed on hilarious monologues like, "I started to hear the word 'draw' in my sleep. Then one day, I was just walking down the street when I heard a voice behind me say, 'Reach for it, mister!' I spun around...and there I was, face to face with a six-year-old kid. Well, I just threw my guns down and walked away. Little bastard shot me in the ass. So I limped to the nearest saloon, crawled inside a whiskey bottle...and I've been there ever since."
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The first of Wilder and Richard Pryors' co-starring outings, director Arthur Hiller's Silver Streak starred Wilder as a book editor falsely accused of murder on a train. False murder accusations became a bit of a recurring pattern in Wilder's career, with his characters in The Frisco Kid (1979), Stir Crazy (1980), Hanky Panky (1982), and See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989) suffering the same.
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In the second vignette in director Woody Allen's 1972 comedy, Wilder played a doctor who falls in love in a sheep. When caught in bed by his wife with said sheep (the partner of one of his patients), Wilder's Dr. Ross explained, "This is Mrs. Bencours, one of my patients. She think she's a sheep."
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Another Wilder-Pryor pairing from director Arthur Hiller, See No Evil, Hear No Evil originally had a script that Wilder turned down twice, citing its offensive treatment of the deaf and the blind. Once he was allowed to re-write the script to better suit himself and Pryor, Wilder prepared for the role by studying at the New York League for the Hard of Hearing. That's where he met speech pathologist Karen Webb, to whom he became happily married for over 25 years until his death.
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In Sir Sidney Poitier's 1980 comedy, Wilder and Pryor played inmates sentenced to 125 years in prison after a bank robbery. In an interview, Wilder credited the movie's success (it tallied over $100 million at the box office, the first film by an African-American director to do so) to Poitier's intimate knowledge of actors and acting and to the harsh reality of prison lurking beneath the comedy: "It's a very funny concept. But what makes it work is a hard edge of reality, a sense of the frustration and the potential for violence, which exists in prison," he said. "It sets off the craziness Pryor and I indulge in. The credit for that goes to Poitier, who knows actors...loves actors...and cast the characters in this film as ingeniously as any director I've ever worked with."
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