httpss://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2Pcn2efSec
He won a coveted spot at the Actors Studio, and it was then that he adopted the name Gene Wilder: Gene for Eugene Gant, the protagonist of Thomas Wolfe’s “Look Homeward, Angel,” and Wilder for the playwright Thornton Wilder.
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 two men went on to star in the 1982 hit “Stir Crazy,” in which they played a hapless pair jailed for a crime they didn’t commit, as well as “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” and “Another You”.Mr. Wilder’s first two marriages, to Mary Mercier and Mary Joan Schutz, ended in divorce.
With chemotherapy and a stem-cell transplant, he was in remission by 2005.In 1991 Mr. Wilder married Karen Boyer, a hearing specialist who had coached him in the filming of “See No Evil, Hear No Evil,” in which his character was deaf, and Mr. Pryor’s was blind.
He made his first and last attempt at a television series, the short-lived and little-remembered comedy “Something Wilder,” in 1994.He returned to the theater in 1997 in a London production of Neil Simon’s “Laughter on the 23rd Floor.” In 1999 he was a writer for two TV movies in which he starred, “Murder in a Small Town” and “The Lady in Question,” playing a theater director turned amateur sleuth.
His “My French Whore,” published in 2007, was the story of a naïve young American who impersonates a German spy in World War I. It was followed by two more novels, “The Woman Who Wouldn’t” and “Something to Remember You By,” and a story collection, “What Is This Thing Called Love?”.But it was, of course, as an actor that Mr. Wilder left his most lasting mark.
A version of this article appears in print on August 30, 2016, on page B9 of the New York edition with the headline: Gene Wilder, Star of ‘Young Frankenstein’ and ‘The Producers,’ Dies at 83.