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A lot of comic actors derive their main force from childish behavior. Most great comics are doing such silly things you'd say, 'That's what a child would do.

Gene Wilder

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Gene Wilder
Age: 83 †
Born: 1933
Born: June 11
Died: 2016
Died: August 29
Actor
Comedian
Diarist
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Stage Actor
Television Actor
Writer
Milwaukee City
Wisconsin
Jerome Silberman
Things
Main
Would
Behavior
Stupid
Child
Childish
Actors
Derive
Force
Comics
Children
Comic
Great
Silly

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When you please your mother by doing something, it gives you confidence that you can please other people.
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My agent at the time, Mike Medavoy, before he became a movie mogul, called me up and said, how about a movie with you and Peter Boyle and Marty Feldman? And I said, well, what makes you think of that? He said because I now handle you and Peter Marty.
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Time is a precious thing. Never waste it.
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Where is fancy bred, in the heart or in the head?
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If you're not gonna tell the truth, then why start talking?
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Gene Wilder often said that his job as an actor wasn't to make something funny but to make it real.
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When people, especially from France, would ask me to talk about or so they could write about New York Jewish humor, I'd say I don't know anything about New York Jewish humor. I know who Zero Mostel was and I know Mel Brooks, but that's about all I could tell you about New York Jewish humor.
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In fact, [Gene Wilder] had made a hysteric seem considerably less funny in his film debut as a terrified undertaker in Bonnie And Clyde. And neurotics soon became his stock-in-trade, whether he was playing the weird title character in Willy Wonka And The Chocolate Factory...
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On screen, Gene Wilder could often be summed up as an accident waiting to happen, that frizzy, flyaway hair, the eyes darting this way and that and then something would set him off, Zero Mostel, say, in the movie that made Wilder a star, The Producers.
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I was miscast in that production [of Mother Courage and Her Children] ... but it was with Anne Bancroft, whose boyfriend at the time was Mel Brooks, and that made my - I can't say my day, it made my life, in a way.
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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.
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If the physical thing you're doing is funny, you don't have to act funny while doing it...Just be real and it will be funnier
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Actors fall into this trap if they missed being loved for who they really were and not for what they could do - sing, dance, joke about - then they take that as love.
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I put out my hand to shake hands with Zero Mostel, and he took my hand [and] he pulled me up to his face, and he gave me a kiss on the lips. And all my nervousness went out the window.
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Zero Mostel wasn't afraid of authority in any form, and that's the part that influenced me the most.
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We gave each other a hug, [Richard Pryor] said how much he admired me, I said how much I admired him, and we started working the next morning, and we hit it off really well, and he taught me how to improvise on camera.
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[Gilda Radner] died in '89, and I got non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2000. I've just passed the five-year mark and I'm now what you call - well, it's called complete remission, but I'm cured. I'm fine.
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I want to be an actor, maybe a comic actor but a real actor.
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I had improvised a lot in classes and at the Actors Studio, but I never did it in front of the camera.
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