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Zero Mostel wasn't afraid of authority in any form, and that's the part that influenced me the most.

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
Part
Influenced
Zero
Authority
Afraid
Wasn
Form

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Little surprises around every corner, but nothing dangerous.
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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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Great art direction is NOT the same thing as great film direction!
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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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On stage or in the movies I could do whatever I wanted to. I was free.
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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.
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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.
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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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[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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Dont put the sheep on the table.
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Where is fancy bred, in the heart or in the head?
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I want to be an actor, maybe a comic actor but a real actor.
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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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I certainly didn't have New York Jewish humor. But I was in three Mel Brooks films so people thought I was a connoisseur of New York Jewish humor.
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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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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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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 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'd like to do a comedy with Emma Thompson. I admire her as an actress so much. I love her. And I didn't know it until recently that her whole career started in comedy.
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