James R | On 30, Aug 2016

Gene Wilder was, quite simply, one of the funniest actors of all time. The brilliant thing was that he never seemed to know it.

Born Jerome Silberman in 1933, his wiry hair and bulging eyeballs meant that his serene face could contort, at any given moment, into that of a cartoon character – his face almost literally popped out of the screen at you. How wonderfully fitting, then, that Jerry chose his stage name to be Wilder.

He appeared in barely any films in his 54-year screen career; over that half a decade, he has just 37 credits to his name, including some voice work and TV appearances. It’s testament to just how good he was that those few roles have stood the test of time for so many people.

It wasn’t just audiences who loved his blend of sentiment and silliness; in 1967, he got his big-screen break in Bonnie and Clyde as an undertaker, which led to his second on-screen turn as Leo Bloom in The Producers. He promptly won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor – a golden statue given to a man who spent 90 minutes screaming uncontrollably and clutching a blue blanket.

Slapstick, verbal wit and that facial expression were an endlessly funny combination. But Wilder’s comedy was also one of threatened insanity, constantly teetering on the brink of implosion, and laced with a sinister rage. In Blazing Saddles, his burnt-out gunslinger, the Waco Kid, was hysterically drunk and bitter – “I was face to face with a six-year-old kid. I just threw my guns down and walked away. Little bastard shot me in the ass.” – but also impossibly, brillantly skilled with a pistol. In Young Frankenstein, his “Froderick” was a scientist so hell-bent on mastering life and death that he became deliriously determined, capable of appearing smart one second and stabbing himself in the leg with a fork the next. In Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), he fell in love with a sheep.

2003 saw him gave his last (and a very rare) on-screen performance in the most unassuming of places: TV’s Will and Grace. Playing Will’s boss, his two-episode cameo once again smuggled that barely surpressed mania into everyone’s living rooms – an out-of-the-blue reminder that Gene could still unleash his Wilder side at any age and in any context. He immediately won an Emmy.

While the second of his Mel Brooks collaborations was his best on-screen performance, though, it’s telling that he’s most remembered today for starring in 1971’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory – a bold renaming of Roald Dahl’s novel that, if any actor played the titular mad-hatted chocolatier, would surely have been damned as heresy. It was here that he really got the chance to show off the darker part of his persona, his enigmatic showman and inventor charmingly swinging between idiocy, imagination and anger.

His smiling, almost sneering appearance has grown to become one of the Internet’s most reconisable memes – the condescending Willy Wonka, whose glare is inherently funny, yet hides a cruel streak. There’s a melancholy, too, that was also present in Will and Grace and Blazing Saddles. His was a face that made you chuckle, but also told us it was alright to sometimes break down into anger or hysterics. He was a comic actor with the gift of making temporary insanity permanently relatable. Please, his Wonka reassures us, as we teeter on the brink of imploding. Tell me more.

 

List of Gene Wilder films currently on Netflix UK:

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask
The Little Prince
See No Evil, Hear No Evil

 

List of Gene Wilder films currently on Sky Cinema / NOW:

Stir Crazy
Blazing Saddles

 

 

 

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