InReview InReview

SA QLD
Support independent journalism

Film & TV

Comedian Jerry Lewis dies, aged 91

Film & TV

Jerry Lewis, the high prince of low-brow comedy on stage and in movies as well as a fund-raising powerhouse, has died of “natural causes” at the age of 91, his family says.

Comments
Comments Print article

“Famed comedian, actor and legendary entertainer Jerry Lewis passed away peacefully today of natural causes at 91 at his home in Las Vegas with his family by his side,” a statement from the Lewis family said.

His spokeswoman, Candi Cazau, said by phone that he died around 9.30am local time on Sunday.

Lewis rose to fame as goofy foil to suave partner Dean Martin and was a comic icon in France.

He once summed up his career by saying, “I’ve had great success being a total idiot”, and said the key was maintaining a certain child-like quality.

“I look at the world through a child’s eyes because I’m nine,” he told Reuters in a November 2002 interview. “I stayed that way. I made a career out of it. It’s a wonderful place to be.”

Lewis was 87 when his last movie, Max Rose, came out in 2013, playing a jazz pianist who questions his marriage after learning his wife of 65 years may have been unfaithful.

The son of vaudeville entertainers, Lewis became a star in the early 1950s as Martin’s spastic sidekick in nightclubs, on television and in 16 movies. At their height, they set off the kind of fan hysteria that once surrounded Frank Sinatra and the Beatles.

Their decade-long partnership ended with a bitter split and Lewis went on to star in his own film comedies.

Lewis’ movie persona, like the character he created in the act with Martin, varied little from film to film. He was zany and manic, forever squealing, grimacing and flailing his way through situations beyond his control.

He starred in more than 45 films in a career spanning five decades. His cross-eyed antics often drew scorn from critics but he was for a time a box-office hit who commanded one of the biggest salaries in Hollywood.

Long after his celebrity faded at home, Lewis was wildly popular in France, where he was hailed as “le Roi du Crazy” (the king of crazy) and inducted into the Legion of Honor, France’s highest award, in 1984. He received a similar honour in 2006.

He explained his popularity in France, by saying: “The French are very visually oriented even though they are cerebral. They enjoy what they see and laugh. Then, later, they ask why.”

Lewis acknowledged that he elicited either love or hate from audiences – and little in between.

– AP

Make a comment View comment guidelines

Support local arts journalism

Your support will help us continue the important work of InReview in publishing free professional journalism that celebrates, interrogates and amplifies arts and culture in South Australia.

Donate Here

Comments

Show comments Hide comments
Will my comment be published? Read the guidelines.

. You are free to republish the text and graphics contained in this article online and in print, on the condition that you follow our republishing guidelines.

You must attribute the author and note prominently that the article was originally published by InReview.  You must also inlude a link to InReview. Please note that images are not generally included in this creative commons licence as in most cases we are not the copyright owner. However, if the image has an InReview photographer credit or is marked as “supplied”, you are free to republish it with the appropriate credits.

We recommend you set the canonical link of this content to https://inreview.com.au/inreview/film/2017/08/21/comedian-jerry-lewis-dies-aged-91/ to insure that your SEO is not penalised.

Copied to Clipboard

More Film & TV stories

Loading next article