Gene Wilder – författare

Gene Wilder defined film comedy in the 1970s and '80s. But this is no traditional autobiography, rather it's an intelligent, quirky, humorous account of key events that have affected him in search for love and art.In this very personal, fascinating book, Wilder gives a great insight into the creative process on stage and screen. He discusses his experiences of working with the very best of movie talent, including Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Sidney Poitier and Richard Pryor, and tells how he developed his own unique style from his early days at The Actors' Studio with Lee Strasberg.Amongst other incidents, he describes his time in the UK, which he has great fondness for, studying at the Old Vic Theatre School in Bristol. During this period he came top of his class at fencing and doorstepped Sir John Geilgud to ask him to explain the use of iambic pentametre.Wilder also talks amusingly about his failed love life off-screen (including 4 marriages) and is candid about much darker times such as the death of his third wife, comedienne Gilda Radner, from cancer. He also reveals his own recent battle with the disease, which he's now come through, and which changed his perspective on life.This isn't a traditional celebrity 'tell all' but an insight into the life and mind of a great comic actor who has a rare ability to write as well as he performs.

This is a winning collection from an author writing on his favourite topic: love. Each emotionally involving story illuminates a different kind of love: star-crossed, intense, needy, eternal, unrequited, even comical. Wilder's protagonists will be instantly recognizable to his fans: men and women who stumble into relationships that can fulfil them or knock them out cold. Which one it will be depends, often, on the smallest of gestures or reactions. Wilder's stories include: "In Love for the First Time", about a lover so shy and studious that he's a 'funny duck' who has to be led by the hand by his equally inexperienced girlfriend; "About Being in Love", featuring coarse but charming Buddy Silverman, who yearns for connection but looks for it in exactly the wrong kind of woman; and, "The Woman in the Red Hat", who shows a writer who has only explored love in his books what the real thing feels like.

Christmas 1944, in a foxhole in Bastogne, Belgium, the innocent yet charmingly clever protagonist, Corporal Tom Cole, is injured. Wilder moves the action to a romantic wartime London with dimly lit blackout-compliant restaurants and mad dashes to the Tube station at the sound of the air raid sirens where Cole convalesces and falls in love for the first time. But is the mysterious Danish girl he meets at the Shepherdess Cafe on the up and up? Cole is a cellist back home in the States, and Anna says she's a monitor at the War Office, scanning radio waves for incoming German planes. But is she? When Cole goes to the War Office one day to surprise his new lover, she's nowhere to be found. Wilder's story takes Cole on a quest for the woman he loves but no longer trusts, and ultimately parachutes him, a newly minted intelligence officer, behind enemy lines into a concentration camp to save her life and discover the truth.

Gilda Radner died of ovarian cancer on May 20, 1989. When the New York Times published "Research Links Diet and Infertility Factors to Ovarian Cancer," by medical writer Larry Altman, on July 25, 1989, Gilda's husband, Gene Wilder, wrote the author to ask some pointed questions. Altman urged him to contact Dr. M. Steven Piver at the Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, New York.Wilder and Piver met via telephone and immediately recognized their shared common desire. From that time, they have worked together to communicate to the general public what is known about ovarian cancer. When Dr. Piver decided to write Gilda's Disease, he asked Wilder to help him by sharing what he had learned during Gilda's struggle so that others might benefit from their ordeal. Wilder and Piver have worked diligently to ensure that the material provided here is accessible and informative without being too scary. The result is a book that offers both medical and personal insights into ovarian cancer.All royalties will benefit two organizations honoring Gilda's memory: "Gilda's Club," a free, nonresidential support community located in New York City for people with cancer, their families, and friends; and "The Gilda Radner Familial Ovarian Cancer Registry" in Buffalo, New York, which tracks women with a family history of ovarian cancer and advises them of their risk for developing the disease and methods of prevention.