Until he was 14, he wanted to be a comedian, Gene Wilder writes in his brand new memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art. Then he was fortunate enough to see the Broadway production of Death of a Salesman, with Lee J. Cobb. It was so powerful an experience that he immediately set himself a new goal -- to be an actor, perhaps a comic actor. He took his stage name from a character in Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel and Thornton Wilder.
Good actors, of course, find the emotional truth of their characters. Wilder's book is an attempt to get at the truths of his life, however painful they might be, including his years in therapy and his marriage to the late comic Gilda Radner, who died of ovarian cancer in 1989.
We met over a cup of his favourite tea (Earl Grey) in Toronto.
Why did you write this book now?
I'd been asked to write a book three or four times. I wanted to write, but didn't know what kind of a structure would work. And that was crucial. I was in California with my wife and her mom and her mom got ill and instead of being there for one week, we were there for two months and I thought, if I don't do something artistic, I'll go a little crazy. So I started writing down all the ironies in my life that changed the course of my life. And I said, this is the structure I've been looking for. So I start with the prologue of ironies, and then go straight to my psychotherapist, Margie Wallace, because then the audience will know that I was nuts. For a while.
You've had such a long, successful career, and yet one feels, reading the book, that you might have told more stories about the people you met.
I didn't want to do a tell-all because I don't like them. I wanted to do selected memories that had to do with the search for love and the art of acting.
For some years during your adolescence, while your mother was suffering from heart disease, you were troubled by what you call a demon, a weird compulsion to pray, often for hours at a time. Did your therapist ever come to a best guess about the cause of this obsession?
She didn't. She made me, the second last time I saw her. She said, "Do you know why you came in the first place?" I said, "I think so. When I was 18, the demons came. The hormones kicked in, sex kicked in, and happiness was ranting and raving, and I thought, 'What right to do I have to be that kind of happy when my mother is suffering every day of her life?' " I didn't think it out that way when I was praying, but I figured it out later on. It only ended after 7½ years of therapy. And then I joined the ranks of the almost sane.
I gather that you're not totally enamoured with the scripts you're getting these days.
What makes you say a silly thing like that? [It's all]sex, vulgarity, the crudest language, repeated over and over, special effects, visual effects and insignificant story lines and movies based on the action, not the character. I have seen some films I've liked -- Hotel Rwanda, Ray and Spanglish I liked a lot. If I'd been offered Spanglish, I would have done it. So there's nothing in the offing, and I don't want to do TV any more, though I'm asked about once a week. I hate situation comedies now. I had my own show for a while, called Something Wilder [it ran in 1994-1995 on NBC] It should have been called Almost Nothing Wilder. The control was all in the hands of the network. I had a good time [making a guest appearance]on Will and Grace. I was on twice. The first time there was something to act, but the second time it was all punch lines. I said, that's the end. It's artificial. It's nothing to do with acting and they're all basically the same. The same kitchen, living room and little stairway. You could kill yourself if you fall off it.
Do you see this as part of the broader dumbing down of contemporary culture?
When you think about I Love Lucy, Dick Van Dyke , Cheers, Taxi, M*A*S*H and compare it to now -- that's dumbing down. What explains that? I'm not a philosopher. I'm only an actor, writer, director, though I'm working now on a novel, a romance.
Who's the funniest actor you ever saw?
The funniest film actor for me was Charlie Chaplin. The funniest I've worked with was Cloris Leachman. She just kills me. She made me laugh so many times. Bob Newhart, of course. Richard Pryor, yes. When he was good, he was very, very good, and when he was bad, he wasn't bad. Richard was a comedian who acted. But Cloris is an actress. She could do drama [ The Last Picture Show]or comedy [ Young Frankenstein] Madeline Kahn was probably the best actress I worked with. . . . I don't understand it. She knew Gilda. She understood. And yet she died of ovarian cancer at such an early age. I don't understand why it was caught so late.
What advice would you give to young actors?
Don't act. It's nothing but rejection. Unless you're one of the lucky, lucky people, and I am one of them. It's just all rejection. I've met so many actors waiting for another job and they get turned down, nine, 10 times, and then they do get one and it keeps them going. And it's harder for women. It's hard for men from an ego point of view but for women -- not only because, after a certain age, they are no longer in demand, but because they cannot understand that when they're rejected, it's because they weren't right for the part. They think the director didn't like them, personally. I've had to say to women, "Did it ever occur to you that you might be 10 times the actress, but someone else is more right for the part?" Oh, the tears I've seen flow.