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Gene Wilder's Widow Karen Boyer Shares Tender Moments And His Final Words In Willy Wonka Star's New Documentary: READ HERE
Through heartfelt recollections, Boyer offers intimate glimpses into their shared moments and the profound sentiments expressed during Wilder's final days.
Keren Boyer, Gene Wilder’s widow, recalled some of the actor’s final moments.
In the new documentary, Remembering Gene Wilder, Keren Boyer, who was married to the Willy Woka star from 1991 until he died in 2016, shared her experience of being with Wilder during the years of his diagnosis with Alzheimer's disease and his final days.
“He hadn't walked alone [in a long time] and it was just a few days before he died, and I looked up and he was walking across the kitchen and then said, ‘I want to go swimming,'” Boyer recalls in the documentary. “He dove into the pool like he used to—I saw his little tush in the air—and I was awestruck.”
She added, “And he took two strokes; he stood up, shook his head the way he always did to get the water out of his ear, and said, ‘That's good.’”
Elsewhere in the documentary, Boyer reminisced about the last words spoken by the Young Frankenstein star and reflected on her experience of being with him as his Alzheimer's disease gradually progressed. Here's her account.
Gene Wilder’s widow reveals the actor’s final words — The actor, 83, confessed love to his wife
In the documentary that is now playing in theaters in New York, Boyer recalled the final words she heard Wilder speak, which came while the couple listened to Ella Fitzgerald’s classic song Somewhere Over the Rainbow.
Boyer said, “The music was playing in the background — Ella Fitzgerald was singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow, and I was lying next to him and he sat up in bed and he said, “I trust you.'”
“And then he said, ‘I love you.’ That's the last thing he said.”
Wilder, who died aged 83 of Alzheimer's, was a renowned stage and screen performer, known for starring in classics like The Prouders, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, and more.
How did Gene Wilder and Karen Boyer meet? Here’s how the latter is remembering her late husband in the documentary
Wilder first met Boyer in 1989. The pair, however, did not go on a first date for over a year after their initial meeting. The duo forged a relationship only after the former’s third wife, comedian and actress Gilda Radner, tragically died at 42 in 1989 of ovarian cancer.
“Gene was wonderful; he was the best husband I think anybody could ask for. To love and be loved is the best gift anybody could ask for, and we had that,” Boyer says in the documentary.
Speaking of the painful experience of watching her late husband struggle with the disease, Boyer said in the documentary, “He never really accepted that he had Alzheimer's, and maybe by the time we found out that’s what it was, his hippocampus didn't let him remember. So I am not sure that he ever knew. When I’d see him slip away further from me, I was sick to my stomach, but I had to keep smiling and tell him that everything was okay.”
Remembering Gene Wilder is currently in theaters in New York.
The documentary will expand to screens across the United States shortly.
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