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.

Twenty-five years after this merry movie charmed audiences with a colourful mix of song, humour and life lessons, the Candy Man still wields magic, expecially now in a vibrant new print with a soundtrack in true stereo.

From the classic Roald Dahl story comes a lip-smacking delight with jolly tunes, among them The Candy Man and Pure Imagination. With a golden ticket young Charlie Bucket wins a tour of the factory of wily mogul Wonka (Gene Wilder) and run by his Oompa-Loompa crew. There Charlie, his Grandpa Joe and others discover a kind heart is a finer possession than a sweet tooth.

Don't let the tour leave without you!

This historical 1966 television adaptation by Arthur Miller of his Pulitzer Prize-winning modern tragedy stars the incomparable Lee J. Cobb and Mildred Dunnock recreating their original Broadway roles.

In a career-defining performance, Cobb portrays Willy Loman, the travelling salesman who's come at last to the end of his dreams. Death of a Salesman has been called the greatest American play of the Twentieth Century, and this classic recording brings forth breath-taking performances from Cobb, Dunnock, George Segal, James Farentino and Gene Wilder.

This landmark production has been digitally re-mastered and will endure for all generations to come. This program as originally recorded was edited for network time considerations with portions of the play's text omitted.

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.

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.

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.

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's frank, charming memoir, KISS ME LIKE A STRANGER, is refreshingly free from the two major sins of show-biz autobiographies: self-aggrandizement and score-settling."--"Los Angeles"" Times"
In this unusually personal book from the beloved star of many beloved and classic film comedies--from "The Producers" to "Young Frankenstein," "Blazing Saddles" to "Willy "Wonka "and the Chocolate Factory"--Gene Wilder writes about a side of his life the public hasn't seen on the screen. Wilder talks about everything from his experiences in psychoanalysis to why he got into acting to the funny, wonderful movies he made with Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Richard Pryor, and many others. He writes candidly about the role of women in his life, about the overwhelming experience of marrying comedienne Gilda Radner, and about what ultimately had to happen for him to find true love. KISS ME LIKE A STRANGER is one actor's life in his own words.
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"Uproarishly funny and at times very moving. It made me want to go out and see every Gene Wilder movie again."--Mel Brooks
"an intimate, unusual memoir...His book candidly explores his own faults and feelings, as well as those of the people he's loved and lost."--"Publishers Weekly"