Jerry Lewis

Synopsis

Born on March 16, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey, Jerry Lewis, then known as Jerome Levitch, grew up performing in a vaudeville family. He met singer Dean Martin in 1944. They developed a comedy act and performed in nightclubs like the Copacabana. They made

 Profile

Comedian, actor, director. Jerry Lewis was born as Joseph Levitch on March 6, 1926 in Newark, New Jersey. His father, Daniel Levitch, who went by the stage name Danny Lewis, was an actor, master of ceremonies and all-around performer. His mother, Rae Lewis, played piano for the New York City radio station WOR and was her husband's musical director. Growing up in a show business family, Lewis began following in his parents' footsteps as a performer from a very young age. He made his debut at the age of five, singing "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?" at New York's "Borscht Belt" nightclubs in the Catskill Mountains.

A decade later, at the age of 15, Jerry Lewis dropped out of high school to pursue a full-time career as a performer. He devised a comedy routine known as the "Record Act" in which he mimed and mouthed the lyrics to operatic and popular songs while a phonograph played the songs offstage. He took his act to the offices of several booking agents before finally landing a gig at a burlesque house in Buffalo. His debut performance fell flat, though, and unable to book any shows at more prestigious venues, Lewis worked as a theater usher and soda jerk to make ends meet. He grew depressed and was on the verge of giving up on his dream of following his parents into show business when a friend of his father's, the comedian Max Coleman, convinced him to give comedy another shot and helped him land a performance at Brown's Hotel in Loch Sheldrake, New York. This time his comedy routine received thunderous applause, and among the enthused audience members was another comedian, Irving Kaye, who helped the young Lewis book more Borscht Belt appearances.

In 1945, a 19-year-old Lewis met a young crooner named Dean Martin while performing at the Glass Hat Club in New York City. A year later, when Lewis was performing at the 500 Club in Atlantic City and another performer suddenly quit, Lewis suggested that the club book Dean Martin as a replacement. On July 25, 1946, Martin joined Lewis as a performer at the 500 Club, and one of the greatest partnerships in the history of American show business was born. Their act began with Martin singing a song only to be interrupted by Lewis, with the routine soon devolving into a hilarious improvised sequence that included ad-libbed insults, food fights, and frequent banter with the audience. Billed as Martin and Lewis, the duo became such an instantaneous success that in a matter of months they went from earning $250 a week to earning $5,000.

In 1949, the pair landed their own regular radio comedy show, The Martin and Lewis Show, and after Paramount producer Hal Wallis saw them perform at the Copacabana nightclub in New York, he booked them both to a film contract. Martin and Lewis made their big-screen debut in the 1949 film My Friend Irma, earning rave reviews. The New York Times wrote, "We could go along with the laughs which were fetched by a new mad comedian, Jerry Lewis by name. This freakishly built and acting young man, who has been seen in nightclubs hereabouts with a collar-ad partner, Dean Martin, has a genuine comic quality. The swift eccentricity of his movements, the harrowing features of his face, and the squeak of his vocal protestations... have flair. His idiocy constitutes the burlesque of an idiot, which is something else again. He's the funniest thing in the picture."

Over the next decade, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis made 16 films together, including My Friend Irma Goes West (1950), The Stooge (1952) and Hollywood or Bust (1956). The pair also made frequent television appearances on the Ed Sullivan Show and the Colgate Comedy Hour. However, by the mid-1950s their partnership and friendship began to fray as Lewis received greater national attention and, as he admitted later, drove Martin away with his egotism and insensitivity. The two split ways, both professionally and personally, in 1956.

After his split with Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis went on to a successful solo career as both an actor and director. His first film without Martin, The Delicate Delinquent (1957), was a huge hit and immediately established Lewis as a star in his own right. In 1959, Lewis signed a new contract with Paramount that paid him $10 million up front and 60 percent of box office profits the most lucrative contract ever signed by a film star at that time. The contract also provided Lewis with greater control over his films, and he made his directorial debut with the 1960 comedy Bellboy. He went on to direct and star in a number of highly successful films, such as The Nutty Professor (1963), Three on a Couch (1966) and The Day the Clown Cried (1972). As an actor, he also turned in an acclaimed performance in the 1982 Martin Scorsese film The King of Comedy, and fulfilled his lifelong dream of acting on Broadway as the star of the 1995 production of Damn Yankees.

Based on his extensive experience as an actor, director and producer, in 1967 Lewis began teaching graduate film courses at the University of Southern California. His lectures have been collected into a book, The Total Film-Maker (1971), which is considered a seminal text on filmmaking. Lewis also has an unusually fanatical following in Europe, and especially in France, where has won Best Director of the Year three times. When his film Hardly Working opened in Paris, the marquee of a cinema on the Champs Elysees read simply, "JERRY."

Jerry Lewis married Patti Palmer in 1944, and they had six children before eventually divorcing in 1982. A year later he married SanDee Pitnick and they have one daughter.

In addition to his prolific career as an entertainer, Lewis is also very active in the fight against muscular dystrophy. He serves as the chairman of the Muscular Dystrophy Association and hosts an annual telethon that has raised nearly $60 million a year in donations. In both his passionate comedic performances and his tireless charitable fundraising, Jerry Lewis displays an insatiable appetite for life. He expresses this boundless joy of living in his own personal motto, borrowed from the Quaker missionary Stephen Grellet: "I shall pass through this world but once. Any good, therefore, that I can do or any kindness that I can show to any human being, let me do it now. Let me not defer nor neglect it, for I shall not pass this way again!"

Source: biography.com