GW: [laughs] Yes.

MN: They suggested you needed to be loved.
GW: Yes, but I do have love now, I'm very happily married. After Gilda died [his first wife, the comedian Gilda Radner, died in 1989] I was fortunate enough to meet, what should I say, the great love of my life, that's a corny expression, but I've been married for 15 years now and I'm happier than I've ever been in my life.

MN: I know that's the truth. I remember reading that when you walk through the house, and you pass each other, you kiss.
GW: [laughs] Well that's true.

MN: Do you know what I think? Affection is the greatest indication of real love.
GW: I agree with you. I was brought up in a Jewish home, we didn't talk about God or religion but we kissed and hugged. I can't understand when I see a married couple and they never touch hands, they don't kiss... maybe it's not always a true barometer but I think I agree with you. How can you not show your affection to someone you love?

MN: Would it be accurate to say that your novel, My French Whore, is also a love affair with acting?
GW: I think it happened partly unconsciously. I wrote it 38 years ago, as a screenplay. I put it aside and after I wrote my memoir, Kiss Me Like a Stranger, I didn't want to stop writing, so I looked at it again. I thought, well, it's not a good screenplay but it is a wonderful story so I started writing and it just flowed out.

MN: I found it intriguing because Paul Peachy, your main character, is a loser in a sense, isn't he? He loses his wife, he's timid, he's a coward for most of the First World War. But then when he pretends to be a spy he's suddenly a hero. I was wondering whether you were exploring the idea that there's a lot of potential lying dormant in all of us.
GW: I'll tell you how it happens. Paul Peachy was also an actor in an amateur theatre company in Milwaukee. So when he was lined up against a tree and about to be shot by the Germans in 1918, the actor in him comes out. In that sense it's autobiographical because I was very shy as a young man except when I was on stage.

MN: Too shy to be yourself, but bold as somebody else, which is what Peachy is, isn't it?
GW: Yes, I could be bold as a character in a play but in real life, without the play, I was sometimes terribly shy.

MN: You've said that acting is not a career you'd ever recommend to someone because it's such a hard - relentless almost - business.
GW: I am frequently asked by young people, how do I get into acting, what should I do? And I say, don't do it. Often the mother will come by and say 'Why did you say that to my daughter?' Because, the road to getting anywhere in acting is just filled with rejection. And if she can't take my rejection how is she going to do with all the rejections she is going to receive auditioning for a part, meeting a producer, then meeting a director who says 'No, no, she's all wrong'? You have to want it so badly that you don't care what they think because you know you're good and you know you're going to make it. But when you say make it, what's the 'it' that you want to make? Fame? Money? Or art? If all you want is to be famous, become a movie star, have your picture on the cover of a magazine, but if you haven't learnt your acting craft yet, then it's silly and it's not going to last very long.

MN: What did you want from acting? Would you have ever done it if it hadn't been for the trauma of your mother's illness?
GW: I saw my sister, she's four years older than me. I was 11 years old and she gave a dramatic recital in a small auditorium of about 200 people and the lights went down, the curtains opened and a spotlight hit my sister and you could hear a pin drop. All eyes were on her and I thought that that was probably about as close to actually being God as you could get. I think I wanted attention, I wanted someone to look at me. I wanted someone to listen to what I was saying. Our family was very loving but my mother was so ill that all the attention went to her - rightly so, but I still had this craving.
MN: What exactly happened with your mother?
GW: She had a disease called mitral stenosis. The mitral valve in her heart was blocked and so she was always in pain. A cardiologist brought my mother home after her first heart attack and said to me: 'Don't ever get angry with your mother because you might kill her'. The other thing he said was try to make her laugh.

MN: What a responsibility to put on your eight-year-old shoulders. Do you think you couldn't ever enjoy yourself, not really, until she died?
GW: My enjoyment came in spurts because I would feel so guilty. I felt what right do I have to be happy when she's suffering? It took me seven and a half years of psychotherapy to understand why. And as you can see, I'm now a healthy, sturdy young fellow!

MN: But you weren't right as rain, were you, because you went through a major threat to your life from cancer.
GW: Well that was in 1999 and I thought I had a kidney stone, a little pain in the back there, so I went to get tested, ultrasound and then tissue samples, and they said no, actually what you have is non-Hodgkin lymphoma. I had nine chemotherapy sessions and after four the tumour was all gone. The specialist said 'You're very healthy, Mr Wilder, and very chemo-responsive but it's going to come back.' I asked when? She said 'six months'. I asked her what'll I do? she said 'Stem cell transplant'.

MN: So you knew what you were in for?
GW: Oh yeah. Even though she told me all those things, the radiation and the heavy chemotherapy and all that, I wasn't frightened about that. I was afraid about what would happen to my wife if I died, because it took me so long to find her.

MN: So you're cured?
GW: I'm in complete remission, which is a little different. Two years ago I went to my doctor and I said 'I'm going on a book tour, and if they ask me can I say I'm cured?' He said, 'Don't say cured because that's an insurance word, actuarial tables and all that, just say you're in complete remission'. I asked what if they don't understand?, and he said 'Just tell them that if you outlive your doctor, then you're cured.' And I realised the best way to achieve that would be to get a gun and shoot my doctor!

MN: You were really facing up to possible death though, weren't you? Do you think that as you have got older that you are more brave about dying? I still don't believe I'm going to die!
GW: I'm brave about it in my head. When the time comes, none of us know what is going to happen, how brave we're going to be.

MN: Do you think there's an afterlife?
GW: No, I don't. But you know I once opened an umbrella inside the house when I was 11 or 12 years old and my father said 'Do you know you just opened an umbrella indoors?' I said 'Daddy, are you superstitious?' And he said 'Not at all, but why take a chance?' I heard Stephen Hawking on Larry King and Larry said 'May I ask you do you believe there's a God?' And Hawking said 'If by God you mean the mathematical equation that accounts for all the galaxies and the black holes, then yes I do.' And I wouldn't say it quite like that, but I would say heaven is here, now, on earth and my heaven is now. I don't believe in the devil or heaven or hell except for the hell that we have on earth, like the Iraq war for instance.

MN: Yes I was glad to see that you were against that because I don't think I could have been quite so friendly with you otherwise!
GW: It's not a war anyway, it's a police action. You can make heaven in your head and your heart and when you find love then you find heaven.

MN: Well it's been heavenly talking to you. Thank you very much indeed.

This interview was first published in Oldie 220, July 2007.