Gene Wilder tribute

Gene Wilder was born as Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee in 1933. In 1955, aged 22 Wilder came over to Britain to begin at the Old Vic Bristol where he stayed for a few years before being drawn back to New York to study his craft further and take on some classical performances. In the early 1960s he met with Mel Brooks and this fateful meeting would change the lives of both men forever after he appeared in a Broadway show with Brooks’s then girlfriend and future wife Anne Bancroft. It was in 1967 that Brooks, Wilder and Zero Mostel teamed up for the zany Broadway comedy with songs, ‘The Producers’. The following year the same team would re-create the stage hit as a full length feature film with Wilder and Mostel repeating their roles as Leopold Bloom and Mostel as his partner Max Bialystock. Much of the play and the characters within, including Wilder’s Bloom came to define some of Wilder’s best performances, a calm mannered attitude that leads to explosive hysteria. He made a career of this, and a very successful one it was too using this steep gear shifts in temperament. Wilder would go on to appear in several of Brooks’ other films including Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein (both 1974) and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Smarter Brother (1975).