Phyllis Diller
Phyllis Ada Driver, better known as Phyllis Diller ( born July 17, 1917 in Lima, Ohio; † August 20, 2012 in Los Angeles, California ) was an American comedienne and actress.
She was considered a pioneer of stand-up Comediennes in the United States and therefore as a pioneer of female comedians as Rita Rudner, Totie Fields, Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, Sandra Bernhard, Joy Behar, Rosie O'Donnell and Roseanne Barr.
Life
Phyllis Ada Driver was the daughter of Perry Marcus Driver and his wife Frances Ada Romshe. She attended the Central High School in Lima, and spent three years studying piano at the Sherwood Music Conservatory in Chicago before she received a scholarship for the Bluffton University in Bluffton, Ohio. The later show host and author Hugh Downs was her classmate. Mid-1950s, she appeared regularly on the Jack Paar Show and was a candidate in Groucho Marx's quiz show You Bet Your Life. She had regular appearances at the Purple Onion, a popular nightclub in San Francisco in the aftermath.
Larger notoriety she gained through appearances on the side of Bob Hope, with whom she has appeared in a total of 23 TV shows and three movies. Although the films were financial failures, Hope invited her in 1966 to joint appearances as part of the U.S. troops in Vietnam a care.
In the 1960s, she appeared regularly on American television and played supporting roles in films such as fever in the blood of Elia Kazan. In the ABC sitcom The Pruitts of Southampton in 1966, she took over the lead role and had in 1968 her own entertainment show The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show.
Phyllis Diller was married three times:
Diller suffered a heart attack in 1999 and went to live with a pacemaker. On August 20, 2012, she died 95 years old at her home in Los Angeles.