Carol Kane says Gene Wilder gave her a second chance
LOS ANGELES — At age 23, Carol Kane was fresh off a Best Actress Oscar nomination with no prospects on the horizon. The phone hadn’t rung for a year, she said. Then Gene Wilder called.
“Out of the blue I got a call from Gene saying that he’d like to meet me about ‘The World’s Greatest Lover,’” Kane said Monday. “(It) was a comedy, which I’d never done before. I have no idea why he thought I could do it, but he was a purist, he was kind of a poet and I met him and he asked me to do this movie with him.”
Wilder, who died Sunday at 83, wrote, directed and starred in “The World’s Greatest Lover,” about a baker (Wilder) and his wife (Kane) who move to Hollywood during the silent film era to enter a talent search for someone who might compete with Rudolph Valentino.
Kane, 64, was only 25 by the time it wrapped, but getting that call from Wilder still felt to her like “a second chance,” she said.