Gene Wilder, Longtime Actor of 'Blazing Saddles,' 'Willy Wonka' Fame, Dies at 83

Gene Wilder, the wild-haired, crazy-eyed comedic actor who starred in such movies as "The Producers," “Blazing Saddles,” “Young Frankenstein” and “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” has died, it was reported Monday. He was 83.

His family said in a statement that the longtime actor died of complications from Alzheimer's disease at his home in Stamford, Connecticut. Wilder was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 1989.

In addition to a storied screen and stage career, Wilder will be remembered for his brief, and very public, marriage to Gilda Radner, the comedian who died of ovarian cancer in 1989.

Born Jerome Silberman in Milwaukee, he adopted the name Eugene at the age of 26 to Thomas Wolfe's character Eugene Gant. He studied drama at the University of Iowa and then attended the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in Bristol, England.

His career began when he appeared on Broadway in 1961. In 1963, he starred alongside Anne Bancroft in "Mother Courage and Her Children."

Bancroft introduced Wilder to Mel Brooks, who shared with him a screenplay of "Springtime for Hitler." His friendship with Brooks would set off his film career, though its start wasn't immediate. He continued to work onstage before he was cast in the 1968 movie "The Producers," where he played the accountant Leopold Bloom, earning him an Oscar nomination. As Variety explains, his "full-fledged" stardom only came with two 1974 comedies, "Blazing Saddles," and "Young Frankenstein," both made by Brooks.

His portrayal of Roald Dahl's magical and beloved character Willy Wonka in the 1971 movie "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" spanned generations as a popular remake of the children's tale did not hit the screens until 2005. Wilder portrayed the dreamy eyed Wonka, principled owner of Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory, who would only let a humbled child with young morals inherit the factory.

Although Wilder's characters on screen were comedic, his personal life was filled with struggles and emotional trauma. When he was an 8-year-old boy in Milwaukee — Wilder wrote in his autobiography, Kiss Me Like A Stranger — a doctor who came to check on his mother told him to never argue with his mother or "you might kill her."

Wilder took the words to heart. He was 23 when his mother died, describing her death as terrible and liberating as he thought, "I'm free to act normally." The Washington Post, in a 2005 article, said that the emotional struggles Wilder described in his autobiography were news even to those who had known him for decades.

Wilder's pain did not lessen as he grew into adulthood. The death of his wife in 1989 left him devastated. In her honor, he helped found the Gilda Radner Hereditary Cancer Program in Los Angeles as well as Gilda's Club, an organization for people living with cancer.

He married Karen Webb in 1991, moving to a home in Stamford, Connecticut, about an hour and a half north of New York City.

This report will be updated.

Image Credit: Caroline Bonarde Ucci [GFDL or CC BY 3.0 ], via Wikimedia Commons