LOS ANGELES—Jerry Lewis, the manic, rubber-faced showman who jumped and hollered to fame in a lucrative partnership with Dean Martin, settled down to become a self-conscious screen auteur and found an even greater following as the tireless, teary host of the annual muscular dystrophy telethons, has died. He was 91.
Lewis died last Sunday of natural causes in Las Vegas with his family by his side, publicist Candi Cazau said.
Tributes from friends, costars and disciples poured in immediately. Jim Carrey called him an “undeniable genius and an unfathomable blessing”. Carl Reiner said on Twitter that Lewis was “a true comic icon”. In Las Vegas, Ceasars Palace, where Lewis was once a headliner, featured a message honoring him on a marquee, and in Los Angeles, fans gathered at Lewis’s two Hollywood Walk of Fame stars—one of which was for television and one for film.
Lewis’s career spanned the history of show business in the 20th century, beginning in his parents’ vaudeville act at the age of 5. He was just 20 when his pairing with Martin made them international stars. He went on to make such favorites as The Bellboy and The Nutty Professor, was featured in Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy and appeared as himself in Billy Crystal’s Mr. Saturday Night. In the 1990s he scored a stage comeback as the devil in the Broadway revival of Damn Yankees.
In his 80s, he was still traveling the world, planning to remake some of his earlier movies and working on a stage version of The Nutty Professor. He was so active he would sometimes forget the basics, like eating, his associates would recall. In 2012 Lewis missed an awards ceremony thrown by his beloved Friars Club because his blood sugar dropped from lack of food and he had to spend the night in the hospital.
In an interview with The Associated Press from 2016, Lewis, at 90 and promoting the film Max Rose, said he still woke up every day at 4:30 or 5 in the morning to write, and had a handful of standup shows on the schedule.
“When the truth comes down to the truth, I am so grateful that I’m on that stage or in front of that camera. I still feel it like it’s the first day,” Lewis said. “To have a career that I had in film, I’m the luckiest Jew that ever lived. I’m so grateful for it. I don’t take advantage of it. I don’t use it improperly. And I love the fact that there’s nowhere I can go where people don’t know me.”
Lewis had many girlfriends and two marriages, one to Patti Palmer, that resulted in six sons and ended in divorce after 36 years in 1980, and a second to Sandra Pitnick, his wife of over 33 years with whom he has a daughter, Danielle Lewis.
Image credits: AP