• February 21, 2000
• Vol. 53
• No. 7

A Quiet Battle

Actor Gene Wilder, Who Nursed Gilda Radner, Confronts Cancer Himself

After his third wife, comedian Gilda Radner, died of ovarian cancer at age 42 in 1989, Gene Wilder spearheaded a public campaign to raise awareness of the disease, most notably by helping to establish Gilda's Club, the support group that today numbers eight chapters around the country (with 17 more in development worldwide). But after a decade of crusading, Wilder told PEOPLE in 1998, "I don't want to talk about cancer anymore." He meant it. Both fans and colleagues were distressed to learn on Feb. 4 that Wilder, 66, had checked into New York City's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center for continued treatment of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, first diagnosed in 1999 and, according to the hospital, currently in remission.

The comic actor (Blazing Saddles) has chosen to follow up chemotherapy with stem-cell replacement, a grueling procedure not unlike a bone-marrow transplant. Given the high rate of recurrence of non-Hodgkin's, the same lymph-system cancer that claimed Jacqueline Onassis's life, the treatment is "very positive and smart," says friend Joanna Bull, Radner's psychotherapist and a cofounder of Gilda's Club (of which PEOPLE is a sponsor). "It has an excellent track record."

By Wilder's side is his fourth wife, Karen Webb, 57, the speech pathologist he wed in 1991. "You want her in your lifeboat," says one close friend. "He'll make it," adds actor pal Mandy Patinkin. "He'll do fine. Attitude is everything. He has the gift of laughter."