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My favorite author is Anton Chekhov, not so much for the plays but for his short stories, and I think he was really my tutor.

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
Much
Tutor
Really
Chekhov
Think
Author
Thinking
Plays
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Short
Stories
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Anton

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Great art direction is NOT the same thing as great film direction!
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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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With Mel [Brooks], only one time and that was later on during Young Frankenstein - never with Zero [Mostel] and never with Mel except I was writing every day, and then Mel would come to the house and read what I'd written. And then he'd say, yeah, yeah, yeah, OK, yeah, OK. But we need a villain or we need whatever it was.
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I want to be an actor, maybe a comic actor but a real actor.
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If you're not gonna tell the truth, then why start talking?
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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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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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My basic mistake in 'The World's Greatest Lover' was that I made the leading character a neurotic kook and sent him to Hollywood. I should have made him a perfectly normal, sane, ordinary person, and sent him to Hollywood. The audience identifies with the lead character.
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Where is fancy bred, in the heart or in the head?
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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.
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I like - it's not that I want to be someone different from me, but I suppose it partly is that. I love creating a character in a fantastical situation, like Dr. Frankenstein, like Leo Bloom, a little caterpillar who blossoms into a butterfly. I love that.
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As they say in Corsica... Goodbye!
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[ Zero Mostel] would tell anyone anything, not to be impolite, but he'd show that he wasn't at all afraid of however much money that person [had] or whatever title they had in a company. It didn't scare him. Mel [Brooks] was very much the same way.
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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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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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When you please your mother by doing something, it gives you confidence that you can please other people.
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So my idea of neurotic is spending too much time trying to correct a wrong. When I feel that I'm doing that, then I snap out of it.
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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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I wanted to be an actor. Maybe a comic actor, but an actor. That's what got me into acting was putting on an act, because in life, I wasn't funny and I felt on stage or in the movies, I could do whatever I wanted to. I was free.
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To match the shoes with the jacket is fey. To match the shoes with the hat is taste.
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