Bob's Take: Gene Wilder was delighted with Cloris Leachman

Sometimes you can be too good at your job.

When Cloris Leachman started up the dark stairs of the castle in “Young Frankenstein,” with a candelabra of unlit candles in her hand and Gene Wilder in tow, her classic line delivered in a thick German accent was: “Stay close to the candles. The staircase … can be treacherous.”

But every time she delivered the line, Wilder dissolved into laughter, and director Mel Brooks had to yell “Cut!”

“Every time I'd look at Wilder's face, he'd be laughing so hard, his face was in two pieces,” Leachman remembered recently. “We did that take about 15 times. With my back to him, I'd take a breath and start to turn, and he was already laughing. He was delighted by me. We had the most fun.”

Wilder, of course, played Dr. Frankenstein in the classic 1974 spoof, which unspools Friday night at 7 at the Joslyn Art Museum. It's Omaha film historian Bruce Crawford's 25th classic movie screening.

Leachman, who played housekeeper Frau Blücher, will be his special guest, talking before the screening and signing copies of her autobiography, “Cloris,” afterward.

Reached by phone recently as she traveled from a Humane Society fundraiser in Vermont to a movie shoot (“The Fields,” a psychothriller) in eastern Pennsylvania, Leachman chatted amiably about her long, amazing career in film and television. At age 83, she's as much in demand as ever. Her son George Englund Jr., who travels with her, said she's been going nonstop for about two years.

“I asked her if she wanted some daylight in the schedule,” Englund said, “but she said no. She likes to stay busy.”

Maybe it's that Midwestern work ethic. Leachman was born in Des Moines.

“We lived outside the city, about three miles east on an acreage,” she said. “We'd get our water from a well in the middle of the acreage next door.”

Through the Works Progress Administration, part of President Franklin Roosevelt's answer to the Great Depression, Leachman took dance lessons and began her love of the arts. She took piano, too. And her third-grade teacher had her read in front of the class, “and that helped me toward acting.”

Then her mother brought home a one-act play, “The Ant and the Grasshopper.”

“I had a little green tutu from my first dance recital, so guess who played the grasshopper,” Leachman said.

She was 8, and her sister Mary, 5, played the ant. Leachman still remembers her first line delivered for an audience: “Ah, the cottage, how cozy it looks.”

By age 11, she was doing radio, playing the lead in a radio drama of “The Little Princess” and reading the funnies on the radio each Sunday. At 17, she pretended to be “Sarah Wallace” for a radio show offering tips for women. She was too young to be taken seriously using her real name, she said.

In accepting her Oscar in 1971 for “The Last Picture Show,” she thanked her mother. Were they close?

“I always realized she was thinking about me when I was away. It was the sweetest thing. She was so original, so imaginative. She'd read to us by candlelight. I loved the poems of James Whitcomb Riley.”

The year after her Oscar win, Leachman began playing nosy Minneapolis landlady Phyllis Lindstrom on the sitcom “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” which earned her two Emmys and led to her own sitcom, “Phyllis.” She won a Golden Globe for that show. In all, she has won eight Primetime Emmys and been nominated for 21.

But ask about her favorite roles, and none of those get mentioned.

Instead, she talks of “The Woman Who Willed a Miracle,” an ABC Afterschool Special from 1983 in which she raises an abandoned baby with physical and mental disabilities who turns out to be a piano prodigy. Also, “A Girl Named Sooner,” a 1975 TV movie about an Indiana moonshining woman who raises a girl abandoned by her family.

I'm sensing a motherly theme here. Yet, asked what advice she had for young actresses who want a long career like hers, she said, “Don't get pregnant.”

She didn't follow her own advice. Leachman had five kids, though she said her career was established before she began having them. And the neighborhood kids — Lorna Luft (Judy Garland's younger daughter) and Katey Sagal (Peg Bundy on “Married … With Children”) — came over all the time to play with her kids.

“I had a linen room at the top of this beautiful staircase, and I called it the screaming room. Anybody who needed to could go in there and scream. They loved that.”

She met Omaha native Marlon Brando when they were both studying at the Actors Studio. For one exercise, she did a slow, sensual dance. Brando noticed and asked her to go out with him, “but I never would. I didn't want to get my heart broken.”

What does she think of Omaha?

“Never been. That's why I'm coming, I want to see it. I just think we're going to have the most fun. Everybody knows this movie, loves it, all ages — they never tire of it.”

And not of Cloris Leachman, either.

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