GENE WILDER, 1933-2016.

Everyone says he was a lovely man, and I don't doubt it. But I never knew him, and if I did know him and he turned out to be a louse, I'd still love him for his films. There are many great comic movie actors, and all of them have that thing called timing, but while many of them make it look easy, few of them make it look as natural as Wilder did. True, his characters were often outsized and manic, but they were grounded maniacs -- you always knew each of them had a very good reason for his fits. When Leo Bloom in The Producers does that weird gibberish over the loss of his blue blanky -- "ungh nuhngnuhngnuhng, ungh nuhngnuhngnuhng" -- it's not just crazy nutso shtick; you really feel the loss of that blue blanky and want him to get it back. (How awful Max Bialystock would have seemed if he didn't give it back!) I love Jack Lemmon, but great as he is I think he wouldn't have elicited the same feeling in that role; Lemmon, when manic, was clearly operating somewhere above the normal spectrum of human behavior ("Security!"). Wilder, on the other hand, made even his most outre behavior look perfectly normal. He was perfect for the post-psychedelic era; he made you comfortable with psychological wreckage.

Yet he could also surprise you with the unexpectedness of his readings. I'm not just talking about oddities like "Stop, don't, come back," but his offbeat way of realizing classic comic builds. Look at the "do not open that door" scene, rendered below: the payoff would probably be funny no matter what, but the absurdly inappropriate mildness of "let me out, let me out of here, get me the hell out of here" just kills me every time. He constantly gave you something fresh, yet after the initial shock it usually made perfect sense. For a performer, that's not too bad a definition of genius.