Your Gene Wilder round-up: NYT. LAT. A/V Club.
In a statement, his nephew Jordan Walker-Pearlman said that the decision not to disclose his condition was not made out of vanity but so that the many children who loved Wilder from his role as the eccentric candy-maker Willy Wonka wouldn’t feel worried or confused. “He simply couldn’t bear the idea of one less smile in the world,” Walker-Pearlman said.
And:
In his first major role on Broadway, Mr. Wilder played the chaplain in a 1963 production of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children.” The production ran for less than two months, and he came to believe that he had been miscast. The good news was that he met the boyfriend of the star, Anne Bancroft: Mel Brooks, who wore a pea coat the night he met Mr. Wilder backstage and told him, “You know, they used to call these urine jackets, but they didn’t sell.”
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