Gene Wilder

The comic actor shares personal events that led to his understanding of love and the art of acting, discussing his relationships with such contemporaries as Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor, and Gilda Radner.

My Search for Love and Art

Kiss Me Like A Stranger

Recounts the tale of a midwestern World War I soldier whose capture by German forces prompts him to impersonate a famous German spy and pursue a romantic relationship with a beautiful courtesan.

My French Whore

In 1903, a young concert violinist named Jeremy Webb one day goes from accomplished adagios with the Cleveland Orchestra to having a complete breakdown on stage. If he hadn't poured a glass of water down the throat of a tuba, maybe he wouldn't have beens

The Woman Who Wouldn't

Follows the experiences of a wounded World War II soldier who falls in love with a mysterious Danish woman during his convalescence in London before realizing that she may not be who she claims to be.

A Perilous Romance

Something to Remember You By

Io, Clara e Cechov

La mia puttana francese. Una delicata storia d'amore

The actor and novelist answers this eternal question twelve ways, in stories that explore our most complicated emotion This is a winning collection from an author writing on his favorite 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 fulfill 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 • “The Woman in the Red Hat,” who shows a writer who has only explored love in his books what the real thing feels like.

What Is This Thing Called Love?

Baciami come uno sconosciuto. La mia ricerca dell'amore e dell'arte

The beloved actor and screenwriter Gene Wilder's first novel, My French Whore, set during World War I, delicately and elegantly explores a most unusual romance. It's almost the end of the war and Paul Peachy, a young railway employee and amateur actor in Milwaukee, realizes his marriage is one-sided. He enlists, and ships off to France. Peachy instantly realizes how out of his depth he is—and never more so than when he is captured. Risking everything, Peachy—who as a child of immigrants speaks German—makes the reckless decision to impersonate one of the enemy's most famous spies. As the urbane and accomplished spy Harry Stroller, Peachy has access to a world he could never have known existed—a world of sumptuous living, world-weary men, and available women. But when one of those women—Annie, a young, beautiful and wary courtesan—turns out to be more than she seems, Peachy's life is transformed forever.

A Love Story

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.

Kiss Me Like a Stranger: My Search for Love and Art

This Thin and Twisted Love

Gene Wilder defined film comedy in the 1970s and '80s, starring in movies ranging from The Producers to Blazing Saddles and See No Evil, Hear No Evil. Kiss Me Like a Stranger is an intelligent, quirky, humorous account of key events that have affected him - as the subtitle puts it, it is his 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.

Kiss Me Like a Stranger

Even Dogs Learn How to Swim

Theatre & Performance Biographical File].

Romantic, dramatic fiction set during World War II by the actor and author of Kiss Me Like a Stranger and My French Whore Something to Remember You By begins during the siege of Bastogne, Belgium on Christmas Day, 1944. In a foxhole where he is caring for five American soldiers, innocent but clever young medic Corporal Tom Cole is injured. Convalescing in wartime London, with its dimly lit blackout-compliant restaurants and mad dashes to the Tube station at the sound of the air raid sirens, Cole falls in love for the first time. But is the mysterious Danish girl he meets at the Shepherdess Café 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. Gene Wilder's Something to Remember You By 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.

For a romantic, it’s life’s ultimate question: What is This Thing Called Love? Actor and novelist Gene Wilder explores twelve possible answers in this emotionally involving book about different kinds of love: star-crossed, intense, needy, eternal, unrequited and even comical. With delicacy of feeling and a simple style that adds to the power of his fiction, Wilder creates memorable lovers and silly suitors, unexpected attraction and careful courting. What is This Thing Called Love? is for anyone who has ever yearned for a deep connection, made a study of love, and spent their life trying to find the real thing. “A lighthearted reminder of love’s potential (requited, even unrequited) to make a life worthwhile.”—Los Angeles Times

The beloved actor and screenwriter's second novel, set in 1903, stars a young concert violinist named Jeremy Webb, who one day goes from accomplished adagios with the Cleveland Orchestra to having a complete breakdown on stage. If he hadn't poured a glass of water down the throat of a tuba, maybe he wouldn't have been sent to a health resort in Badenweiler, Germany. But it's in that serene place that Jeremy meets Clara Mulpas, whom he tries his hardest to seduce. Clara is so beautiful that Jeremy finds it impossible to keep from trying to find a chink in her extraordinary reserve and elegance. He finds himself reflexively flirting to get a reaction—after all, a tease and a wink have always worked before, with women back home. But flirting probably isn't the best way to appeal to a woman who was married to a dumb brute and doesn't want to have anything more to do with men. Jeremy isn't sure how to press his case—but he won't give up. Wilder's prose is elegant, spare and affecting. But it's his romantic's eye for the intense emotions that animate a real love story that makes The Woman Who Wouldn't an unforgettable book.

Gene Wilder

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