Quote

Gene Wilder often said that his job as an actor wasn't to make something funny but to make it real.

Gene Wilder

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

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
Something
Genes
Make
Actor
Wasn
Actors
Funny
Jobs
Often
Wilder
Real
Gene

More quotes by Gene Wilder

Image
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.
Gene Wilder
Image
Time is a precious thing. Never waste it.
Gene Wilder
Image
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.
Gene Wilder
Image
I met Mel [Brooks] backstage in Anne's [Bancroft] dressing room. He was wearing one of those pea coats, pea jackets that were made famous by the Merchant Marines, and I admired it and he said, You know, they used to call this a urine jacket, but it didn't sell.
Gene Wilder
Image
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.
Gene Wilder
Image
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.
Gene Wilder
Image
When you please your mother by doing something, it gives you confidence that you can please other people.
Gene Wilder
Image
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
Image
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.
Gene Wilder
Image
For what we are about to see next, we must enter quietly into the realm of genius!
Gene Wilder
Image
On stage or in the movies I could do whatever I wanted to. I was free.
Gene Wilder
Image
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.
Gene Wilder
Image
Great art direction is NOT the same thing as great film direction!
Gene Wilder
Image
I write funny. If I can make my wife laugh, I know I'm on the right track. But yes, I don't like to get Maudlin. And I have a tendency towards it.
Gene Wilder
Image
I met Richard Pryor for the first time in Calgary, in Canada. A very quiet, modest meeting.
Gene Wilder
Image
I want to be an actor, maybe a comic actor but a real actor.
Gene Wilder
Image
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.
Gene Wilder
Image
[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.
Gene Wilder
Image
Which one of us, anywhere in the world, doesn't yearn to be believed when the audience is watching?
Gene Wilder
Image
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.
Gene Wilder