Celebrity Travel: Go Away With James Wilder
James Wilder may best be known for his acting skills ("Melrose Place," "Murder One," "Equal Justice"), but he's also an architect and designer whose work was featured on HGTV. Wilder designs leather jackets. And he can still juggle things on fire, like he used to when he was a teenage street performer. Wilder, 46, costars in the upcoming indie thriller "3 Holes and a Smoking Gun." Fans may follow him on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/pages/James-Wilder/795831717123016.
Q. Did your family travel a lot when you were growing up?
A. I've been traveling basically since birth. My mother's Parisian and my father's Italian. He was born in the U.S. to an immigrant family. My mother was an immigrant from Paris who didn't speak English. I'm an only child. She said that San Francisco is as close to a European city as possible, so we went that way. And I was always encouraged to explore and travel from a very young age.
Q. What was your first solo trip?
A. When I was 14, I had a contract to play the Moulin Rouge in Paris.
Q. You went to France by yourself?
A. (Laughs) In Europe, kids were left to their own designs. It was a much safer place than in the U.S. My father was a little apprehensive about letting me go, but my mother was fine with it. She said he's already going through an accelerated learning institution and he's bilingual. Let him travel and make money. It was great.
Q. How did this come about?
A. I started as a street performer when I was 11 in Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco. I performed there with Shields and Yarnell, Harry Anderson and A. Whitney Brown. I was the little one. They were maybe in their 20s. They were very nice to me. If you had a good one-man show, you were treated a bit like a special thing in San Francisco. These one-man shows were like live shows on stage that you have to audition for. Each time I performed, there was an audience of maybe 300 people sitting on benches. During that time, I was spotted by an international booking agent, and that's how I got the Moulin Rouge offer.
Q. What was it like living in Europe as a young teen?
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