Jerry Lewis, Legendary Performer, Director and Philanthropist, Dies at 91

Jerry Lewis, the comedian, actor and director who rose from the “Borscht belt” to stardom in radio, film and television, died Sunday morning in Las Vegas, Nev., at age 91. The news was first reported on Twitter by Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist John Katsilometes.

Lewis, born Joseph Levitch in Newark, N.J., in 1926, began his career in childhood, performing on stage in New York’s Catskill Mountains, but his big break came when he met singer Dean Martin in 1945. With an act that featured a novel blend of song, stand-up, and vaudeville traditions, “Martin and Lewis,” as the pair came to be known, swiftly made a mark as one of the most fruitful artistic partnerships of the postwar years, producing a popular radio show and 16 films together between 1949 and 1956.

After his acrimonious split with Martin, Lewis made a string of successful film comedies in the late 1950s and 1960s, first as an actor and then as actor/director—including, most famously, 1963’s The Nutty Professor. Despite a decade-long run of hits, however, Lewis’ career as screeched to a halt in 1972 with his notorious, never-released drama The Day the Clown Cried (1972), about a circus clown imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. (Years later, Harry Shearer, having seen a rough cut the late 1970s, described it in Spy magazine as “drastically wrong, its pathos and its comedy… wildly misplaced.) Throughout the rest of the 1970s and into the 1980s, Lewis’ credits as actor, writer and director were sparse.

It would take another collaboration, this time with filmmaker Martin Scorsese, to resuscitate Lewis’ career: In Scorsese’s brilliant, jet-black satire The King of Comedy (1983), as a talk show host kidnapped by an aspiring comic (Robert De Niro), Lewis delivered perhaps his finest performance, twisting his own persona to new and unsettling ends.

Whether beloved (for his sparkling improvisations and confident slapstick) or bemoaned (as a temperamental, difficult artist), Lewis’ was one of the most influential comic voices of his era. Still, he may be best known for his philanthropic work: Between 1966 and 2011, his annual telethon to raise money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association was a Labor Day weekend mainstay, and even witnessed his reunion with Martin, who appeared on the program in 1976. For his role in the fight against muscular dystrophy, Lewis received the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 2009.

As he aged, however, Lewis’ sense of humor and political views came to be seen as not only old-fashioned but offensive; among other controversial remarks, his use of the word “fag” during the 2007 telethon strained his relationship with the MDA and led to a public apology. As with his collaboration with Martin, his tenure as the telethon’s host and the organization’s national chairman came to a rancorous end in 2011, after a now-infamous press conference at the Television Critics Association summer tour in which he sharply criticized reality TV shows produced by Nigel Lythgoe and Allison Sweeney, both of whom were involved in the telethon.

Lewis’ last film appearance came in the 2013 film Max Rose, in which he played a widowed musician.