Gene Wilder and the love(s) of his life

Gene Wilder snob here.

Something has been on my mind, and I saw someone else tweet about it, so I now feel compelled to share.

Gene Wilder loved Gilda Radner, and Gilda Radner loved Gene Wilder. Their time together was brief — eight years — and it was extremely rocky…and magical…and complicated...and tragic.

But Gilda was a deeply insecure and needy woman. “She smothered me like a baby,” Wilder told Larry King in a 2002 interview. In fact, he left her early on in their courtship. “Gene said he was suffocating, that my needs were smothering him,” Radner wrote in her biography, It’s Always Something. But he loved her deeply, and he found that he didn’t want to be without her. Their marriage was filled with beautiful moments, and stress and heartache; their inability to have children and Gilda’s difficult and terrifying battle with ovarian cancer overshadowed most of their marriage. When Radner passed, Wilder was heartbroken — “I believed she would make it” — and became a huge advocate for cancer screening (ovarian cancer ran in Radner’s family, and he felt that if she had been tested early on, she would have survived). He testified in front of of Congress on the topic and co-founded Gilda’s Club, a place for families affected by cancer to get support.

Two years after Gilda passed, he married his fourth wife, Karen, who was with him until his death. He told Larry King in 2002 that by his third date with Karen, it was love. “It was like a flower that’s blooming,” he said. And in a 1996 The Telegraph interview, Wilder said about Karen, “For the first time in my life I have unconditional love.” They were married for 25 years.

Though I’m sure Wilder and Radner are “reunited at last,” remember he also had another true love.

Learn more about Gene and Gilda’s relationship on my podcast, Love Will Tear Us Apart.