That hair.
It’s no surprise that many of the loving remembrances of Gene Wilder, which came pouring in on Twitter after the announcement of his death Monday, mentioned his unruly hair.
“RIP Gene Wilder who made curly hair sexy/funny,” wrote one fan.
“RIP Gene Wilder, you were my style icon, thank you for the hair style that shaped my childhood” was another.
• Photos: Gene Wilder, star of ‘Willy Wonka’ and Mel Brooks movies, dies at 83
To go with that hair, which seemed to have a mind of its own, was a kind face, an impish smile and matinee-idol blue eyes. No matter what the role — Dr. Frederick Frankenstein, Willy Wonka or Leo Bloom in “The Producers”— Wilder made all that funny business look easy.
Wilder’s nephew said Monday that the actor and writer died late Sunday at his home in Stamford, Connecticut, from complications from Alzheimer’s disease.
Jordan Walker-Pearlman said in a statement that Wilder, 83, was diagnosed with the disease three years ago, but kept the condition private so as not to disappoint fans.
“He simply couldn’t bear the idea of one less smile in the world,” Walker-Pearlman said.
Wilder was a wonderfully talented actor, who before becoming a movie star had studied classical and method acting and been known for serious roles onstage. What made him so unbelievably funny was that he was believable as the character no matter how outrageous.
Still, he was an unlikely star, and in the early days Hollywood probably had him pegged as a character actor or comic relief. He was a little bit of both in his first film appearance in 1967’s Oscar-winning “Bonnie and Clyde.” Playing a strangely odd hostage in his first film, Wilder’s appearance was brief and memorable, but hardly what one would imagine could launch a movie career.
Luckily, Mel Brooks already knew Wilder from the New York stage. The actor had starred with Anne Bancroft — Brooks’ future wife — in a production of “Mother Courage and Her Children” in 1963.
When Brooks made “The Producers,” he cast Wilder as the nebbish accountant Leo Bloom, a counterpoint to Zero Mostel’s outsized Max Bialystock. Few can forget Leo’s panic attack when Max takes away his little blue blanket.
“I’m wet. I’m wet. I’m hysterical and I’m wet,” he cries after Max throws water on him to calm him down. What makes the scene so funny is that Wilder doesn’t overplay it. It’s almost as if Leo is assessing his condition as he is reacting to it.
“No one has Gene’s pauses and explosions,” Brooks once said about him.
When the film was released at the end of 1967, it took a while to be discovered, but Wilder was nominated for an Academy Award for best supporting actor.
His career didn’t take off immediately. Wilder kept getting offers to play hysterical characters, and he fought against it. “The Producers,” however, heralded a brilliant collaboration, with Brooks, who cast Wilder as the lead in “Blazing Saddles” and “Young Frankenstein” — or “Franken-STEEN,” as his character angrily insisted.
That film had been Wilder’s idea, and he wrote the original script, which he then rewrote with Brooks after he came on to direct. Brooks was going to cast him for the villain in his faux Western “Blazing Saddles,” but Wilder convinced him to let him play the gunfighter Waco Kid.
His three films with Brooks are so indelible that you would have thought they made more together. All three are in the top 15 of the American Film Institute’s 100 best comedies.
As Brooks has admitted, “The Producers” would have been a good film with just Mostel and another actor, but having Wilder took it to another level.
Wilder always did that in his movies. He could elevate weak material and shine in less-than-stellar films, such as Woody Allen’s “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex*.” In that one — a series of sketches — he plays a psychiatrist who falls in love with a sheep. It’s altogether silly, but he plays it with such a subtle touch that even as the situation grows increasingly funny it’s almost poignant.
A side of Wilder that doesn’t come to mind readily is that he could be a romantic lead, as in 1984’s “The Woman in Red.”
“There is something romantically appealing about him,” the late director Arthur Hiller noted.
Hiller directed Wilder in 1976’s “Silver Streak,” where the actor played a book editor who becomes entangled both in a mystery and with a sexy passenger played by Jill Clayburgh while on a train from Los Angeles to Chicago.
Of course, “Silver Streak” began Wilder’s other great collaboration, the one with comedian Richard Pryor. The two would do three more films together, and there was certainly something special about them on the screen together.
When Wilder was six, his mother had a heart attack. Wilder remembered the doctor telling him, “Don’t ever get your mother angry because you might kill her. So try to make her laugh.”
He did that for her while growing up, and he did it for us for the rest of his life.
One fan remarked on Twitter that she was thinking just the other day that her daughter had Gene Wilder hair. Because of his films, people are always going to be laughing and remembering Gene Wilder’s hair, but no one is going to remind us of Gene Wilder.
He was one of a kind.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
