“TIME,” GENE WILDER tells the children in the Chocolate Factory, “is a precious thing. Never waste it.”
Wilder was playing his most famous role, as Willy Wonka, when he delivered the line, yet his celebrated career, which ended this week, suggested it was his personal credo.
From the Producers in 1967, to Willy Wonka in 1971, Blazing Saddles in 1974 and Stir Crazy in 1980, Wilder starred in dozens of movies, tv shows and plays.
Yet his fourth film has proved legendary with Irish audiences.
Quackser Fortune Has A Cousin In The Bronx was partly set in Dublin, and featured a young Wilder doing his best stage Irishman impression.
The film concerns a humble manure collector, the eponymous Quackser Fortune, who falls in love with a wealthy American student who visits Dublin.
Scenes were filmed in Trinity College Dublin and John Kavanagh’s pub in Dublin 7, also known as The Gravediggers, as well as near the Pepper Cannister Church in Dublin’s south Georgian quarter.
Wilder almost adopted a poor Dublin child he met on the scene, with the Irish Government’s approval.
Pay scale
It also featured a brief cameo for a young David Davin-Power, now RTÉ’s political correspondent.
“I had a very very small in Quackser which, as you know, was a movie that brought whimsy to new levels,” Davin-Power told RTÉ Radio 1 this week.
I was an extra, and because I had very long hair and looked like a student, I was called upon to direct Gene Wilder to where this young lady’s quarters were.So I actually had a speaking part in this, I said ‘she went that way’.
Unfortunately, the film producers discovered Davin-Power would need to be on a different pay scale if his voice was recorded too, so he was dubbed out of it.
Thorough gentleman
“So there you are,” he said.
It was nanosecond of the movie, Gene Wilder tricks his way past a security guard, into Trinity, runs across the front square, meets this hairy student who says ‘she went that way’, and that was it.
“Well I tell you, it made me an absolute aristocrat among all the other extras, because in fairness to Gene Wilder he was a thorough gentleman, and we worked on the movie for two or three weeks, and he always greeted me by name.
“So to have the star of the movie saying to you ‘how are you doing this morning, David’ – people were looking at me with their eyes out on stalks.
Davin-Power wasn’t the only Irish actor to remember their role in the film this week.
“I had about two nanoseconds in the movie,” said Helen Jordan, who was a dancer in the Trinity Boat Club party scene.
“I worked as a dancer, I was in the scene with Gene and Margot [Kidder], where they were dancing at the Trinity Ball.
God, they were gorgeous. But they fell madly in love, did you know that? On the set.
“On that movie, they were madly in love. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other in all the breaks,” Jordan added.
Jordan said Margot approached her for a dancing tutorial for a scene.
“So, she said: ‘I was wondering would you hang on, for an hour or two, I’ll make sure you’re well paid, and teach me a few moves so I’m more comfortable in this scene.
“But I couldn’t because I was doing a gig that night in Cleary’s ballroom, I was singing with a band!
And I had to be on stage at 9pm, and the coaching was at 8pm, so I had to say ‘very sorry Margot, but I can’t’.
But Jordan had no regrets of forgoing her chance to become dancing teacher to the stars.
“She went on to be Lois Lane.
“But you have to [stand by your gig], if you’re committed to the gig, you’re committed and nothing stands in your way.”
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