Jerry Lewis

Jerry Lewis (1926- ), American actor, screenwriter, film director, and producer, the world’s top box-office screen comic of the 1950s and 1960s. Originally named Joseph Levitch, and born on March 16, 1926, in Newark, New Jersey, the son of show-business parents, Jerry Lewis made his stage debut at the age of five. Ten years later he had his own stand-up comedy act on the vaudeville circuit, and by 1946 had teamed up with singer Dean Martin in a comic duo that achieved great popularity on stage and television, as well as in clubs.

Playing off Martin’s suave self-confidence against Lewis’s flailing idiocy, the pair created a hit act and in 1949 were signed by veteran producer Hal Wallis to make films for Paramount. Together they made 16 films, hugely popular, though held in disdain by most critics. Lewis, ambitious and increasingly frustrated, split up the partnership in 1956.

Jerry Lewis’s first solo film was The Delicate Delinquent (1957), which he also produced. However, Lewis yearned for total control: with The Bellboy (1960) he took over direction and scripting as well. Of the films that followed, his Jekyll-and-Hyde spoof The Nutty Professor (1963) is generally reckoned to be his best, though British and American critics still dismissed his style of comedy as crude mugging, and the films themselves as shapeless. In France, though, Lewis became a cult hero, hailed as “Le Roi du Crazy”, and was rated a major creative artist by such respected figures as Jean-Luc Godard.

Lewis withdrew from film-making after a run of flops in the late 1960s, though his annual telethon in aid of the Muscular Dystrophy Association kept him in the public eye. With the Martin Scorsese film The King of Comedy (1982) he embarked on straight acting roles, gaining the best notices of his career. In subsequent years he gave a touching performance in Emir Kusturica’s Arizona Dream (1993) and was well received in Peter Chelsom’s Funny Bones (1995). As a comedian, he influenced the American actor Jim Carrey and the British comic Lee Evans, with whom he worked on Funny Bones.