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Wilder's growth as a man and an actor has had its own special agonies. He was born Jerry Silberman in Milwaukee, the only son of a prosperous manufacturer of miniature beer and whiskey bottles. When his parents sent him to Black Fox Academy in Hollywood, he recalls, "I was the only Jew in the school, and I got either beat up or insulted every day." He was soon back in Milwaukee taking drama lessons after school and playing summer stock in the East. Wilder studied slavishly—at the University of Iowa, at the Old Vic in London, with Lee Strasburg in New York. A stint as a draftee medic in the neuropsychiatric ward at Valley Forge Army Hospital taught him almost as much as all the lessons. "I chose the job because it seemed most applicable to acting," he told TIME Writer Mark Goodman last week. "I've always been drawn to roles of emotional cripples."
Frenetic Ineptitude. In 1961 Wilder landed an off-Broadway role as a North Country farm boy in Arnold Wesker's Roots. His big movie break came in The Producers; though the 1968 film was a disaster, Wilder's frenetic ineptitude won him an Oscar nomination. As the frightened undertaker snatched for a joyride in Bonnie and Clyde, Wilder stirred almost as much comment as Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.
For all his screen intensity, Wilder offscreen is relaxed and polite almost to the point of diffidence. "My quiet exterior used to be a mask for hysteria," he says. "After seven years of analysis, it just became a habit." In search of tranquillity, he, his wife and her daughter by a previous marriage are spending the summer at Long Island's Westhampton Beach. Otherwise they live in a modest two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan. Wilder wants simplicity, but not complete conventionality. "Quackser was only half a step off the ground from what is considered normal. That's me. My sister told me: 'Quackser has given you the chance to be what you've always wanted. A happy peasant.' She was right. That's what I've always wanted to be, a happy peasant."