Phyllis Diller Biography

Phyllis Diller	Phyllis Ada Driver Born: 1917-07-17 Birthplace: Lima, OH Race: White Religion: Atheist Field: Actor, Comic Famous for: The original female stand-up comic
Field: Actor

Phyllis Diller is an American comedian who is considered one of the pioneers of female stand-up comedy. The stage character she created was a wild-haired, oddly-dressed housewife who was ugly but didn't realize it, and who made jokes about a husband named "Fang" while smoking from a long cigarette holder. She is also known for her distinctive, cackling laugh, one of the best-recognized in comedy.

A typical Diller joke had her running after a garbage truck pulling away from her curb. "Am I too late?" she'd yell. The driver's reply: "No, jump right in!"

Diller is generally thought to have opened the stand-up field to women such as Totie Fields, Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, Sandra Bernhard, and Roseanne Barr.

Diller was born to Perry Marcus Driver and Frances Ada Romshe in Lima, Ohio and attended Lima Central High School (now known as Lima Senior). Her German great-great-great-grandfather, Ludwig Treiber, anglicized the surname to Driver. A housewife, mother and advertising copywriter, Diller appeared on The Jack Paar Show and as a contestant on Groucho Marx's quiz show You Bet Your Life in the mid-1950s. Later in the decade, her career took off after selling out 87 straight weeks at San Francisco's legendary nightclub The Purple Onion. It was there that Diller honed her act. In her heyday, Diller achieved a record that still stands today in the Guinness Book of World Records for delivering 12 punchlines per minute.

Bob Hope costarred with Diller in 23 TV specials and in three films in the late 1960s, Eight on the Lam, The Private Navy of Sgt. O'Farrell, and Boy, Did I Get A Wrong Number!. All of these films were failures at the box office, but Hope invited Diller to perform with him in Vietnam in 1966 with his USO troupe during the height of the conflict in that country.

Though her main claim to fame is her stand-up comedy act, Diller also has appeared in other films besides the three mentioned above, including a cameo appearance as a wisecracking lounge-act emcee in the 1961 Hollywood production of Splendor in the Grass. She appeared in more than a dozen, generally low-budget movies, including as The Monster's Mate in the Arthur Rankin/Bass animated cult classic Mad Monster Party (1967), co-starring Boris Karloff. She also starred in two short-lived television series: The Pruitts of Southampton on ABC in 1966 and the variety show The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show on NBC in 1968. In 1998, Diller parlayed her unique cackle into the vocals for "The Queen" in Disney/Pixar's animated movie A Bug's Life.

More recent television appearances for Diller have included a guest spot on the long-running family drama, 7th Heaven, where she hilariously boozed it up while cooking dinner for the household. In 2005, Diller was featured as one of many contemporary comics in a documentary film, The Aristocrats. Diller, who avoids working blue, did a version of the joke in which she describes herself passing out when she first heard the joke, forgetting the actual content of the joke.

Diller, a longtime resident of Brentwood, credits much of her success to the late Bob Hope, in large part because he included her in the pictures and Vietnam USO shows mentioned above.

She is an accomplished pianist as well as a painter.

Diller has bluntly discussed her plastic surgery, which changed her persona from being deliberately ugly to somewhat chic for her age. Diller's efforts have drawn numerous awards and acknowledgments from plastic surgeons and medical organizations.

Diller has been married three times; she divorced twice and was widowed once. She has five children from her marriage to her first husband, Sherwood Diller, on whom "Fang" was based. Diller's daughter Sally has suffered from schizophrenia for most of her life. Diller's second husband was Warde Donovan. Diller is a grandmother several times over.

Most recently, Diller has suffered serious medical problems, including a heart attack in 1999 which culminated in her being pronounced clinically dead for three minutes. After a stay in hospital she was fitted with a pacemaker and released. She has since retired from standup performance, although she did appear on The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson on January 20, 2006 to publicize her autobiography. A bad fall resulted in her being hospitalized for tests on her head and pacemaker in 2005.

She wrote an autobiography titled Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse. A screenplay about Diller's early years in showbiz is in preproduction with actress Patricia Clarkson slated to play Diller in a film due to be released in 2006.