Biografia

Soft mellow voice

Curly brown hair and blue eyes

Often played highly eccentric yet likeable characters

Often worked with Richard Pryor

Often worked with Mel Brooks

One of his all-time favorite songs was "Over the Rainbow", and particularly the version sung by Ella Fitzgerald. According to his family, as Wilder laid on his deathbed, the music player (which was set to random) changed to this song. Wilder then smiled, closed his eyes, and peacefully passed away.

While serving in the United States Army from 1956-1958, he was assigned as a Medic to the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology at Valley Forge General Hospital in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. He worked in treating psychiatric patients.

His performance as Willy Wonka in A Fantástica Fábrica de Chocolate (1971) is ranked #38 on Premiere magazine's 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time.

Appeared in four of the American Film Institute's 100 Funniest Movies: Banzé no Oeste (1974) at #6, Primavera para Hitler (1967) at #11, O Jovem Frankenstein (1974) at #13 and O Expresso de Chicago (1976) at #95.

In October 2001, he read from "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" as part of a special benefit performance held at the Westport Country Playhouse to support families affected by the September 11 attacks. Also in 2001, Wilder donated a collection of scripts, correspondences, documents, photographs, and clipped images to the University of Iowa Libraries.

[on Mel Brooks] A loud kind of Jewish genius--maybe that's as close as you can get to defining him.

Woody [Woody Allen] makes a movie as if he were lighting 10,000 safety matches to illuminate a city. Each one is a little epiphany: topical, ethnic or political.

[on the movie A Fantástica Fábrica de Chocolate (2005) to the Daily Telegraph] It's all about money. It's just some people sitting around thinking, "How can we make some more money?" Why else would you remake "Willy Wonka" [A Fantástica Fábrica de Chocolate (1971)]?

[on his role in Tudo o que Você Sempre quis Saber Sobre Sexo, mas Tinha Medo de Perguntar (1972)] And that's not an easy task, being in bed with a sheep, especially if you make the sheep nervous. I'm not going to go on, if you know what I'm talking about.

I'm not so funny. Gilda [Gilda Radner] was funny. I'm funny on camera sometimes. In life, once in a while. Once in a while. But she was funny. She spent more time worrying about being liked than anything else.