Gene Wilder
Gene Wilder was an American Emmy Award-winning and twice Academy Award-nominated stage and screen comic actor, screenwriter, film director, and author.
Wilder began his career on stage, making his screen debut in the film Bonnie and Clyde in 1967. His first major role was as Leo Bloom in the 1968 film, The Producers. This was the first in a series of prolific collaborations with writer/director Mel Brooks, including 1974's Young Frankenstein, the script of which garnered the pair an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. Wilder was known for his portrayal of Willy Wonka on Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) and for his four films with Richard Pryor: Silver Streak (1976), Stir Crazy (1980), See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989), and Another You (1991). Wilder directed and wrote several of his films, including The Woman in Red (1984).
His marriage to actress Gilda Radner, who died from ovarian cancer, led to his active involvement in promoting cancer awareness and treatment, helping found the Gilda Radner Ovarian Cancer Detection Center in Los Angeles and co-founding Gilda's Club.
In more recent years, Wilder turned his attention to writing, producing a memoir in 2005, Kiss Me Like A Stranger: My Search for Love and Art, and the novels My French Whore (2007) and The Woman Who Wouldn't (2008).
“Climbing hills was never one of my great ambitions. Perhaps I was just lazy, but I admit--now that I've been climbing a hill every other day--that it's very difficult to think about the stresses in your life while you're trying to avoid falling backwards when a goat with large horns is chasing you because you came too close to the little patch of grass he was planning to eat for breakfast.”
“I never thought of it as God. I didn't know what to call it. I don't believe in devils, but demons I do because everyone at one time or another has some kind of a demon, even if you call it by another name, that drives them.”
“dont put the sheep on the table”
“What did you expect? Welcome, sonny? Make yourself at home? Marry my daughter? You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know . . . morons”
“Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple”
“Which one of us, anywhere in the world, doesn't yearn to be believed when the audience is watching?”
“As they say in Corsica... Goodbye”
“If you're not gonna tell the truth, then why start talking?”