If there’s such a thing as a permanent mark that an actor can leave on show business, then Gene Wilder left it. For generations of kids, he was the Willy Wonka — the seizure-inducing nightmare man screaming poems at kids on a riverboat and exploding them with DNA-altering bubblegum. For sadder, more inside-recess-inclined kids, he was the Fox in The Little Prince and the Mock Turtle in that bizarre Alice in Wonderland from the ‘90s. Adults, meanwhile, loved him across a decade of collaborations with Mel Brooks, playing Leo Bloom in The Producers, the Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles, and Frederick Frankenstein in Young Frankenstein.
In his personal life, Wilder would be among the first to admit that things were less legendary. He was married four times — to costume designer Karen Boyer from 1991 until his death in 2016, most famously to SNL royalty Gilda Radner from 1984 to her death in 1989, to Mary Joan Schutz between 1967 and 1974, and to his first wife, Mary Mercier, from 1960 to 1965.
None of Wilder’s partnerships produced biological children, though he stated in his memoirs that he and Radner had been trying to conceive in the days leading up to her ovarian cancer diagnosis.
The Academy Award-nominee did have one kid, however — a girl named Katharine, Schutz’s daughter from a previous marriage. Wilder adopted her the same year that he and Schutz were married, but the two became estranged under circumstances that the actor described to Larry King as “too sad a story to go into.” Meanwhile, Wilder was reportedly very close with his nephew, Jordan, who signed off the announcement of Wilder’s death by referring to himself as “Gene’s kid.”
Did Gene Wilder have children?
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