Zany US comedian with a wise-cracking line in
self-mockery
Phyllis Diller, who has died aged 95, was a raucous, zany
comedian, with a special line in self-deprecation bordering on
flat-out self-mockery. In old age she described herself as a sex
symbol for men who don't give a damn, and she treasured Bob Hope's
remark that she was so ugly that a peeping Tom once threw up on her
windowsill.
She patented this frank, outspoken line in female bodily
imperfections well ahead of Joan Rivers but,
unlike Rivers, who appeared on stage without props or wacky wigs,
more or less as herself, with Diller it was all an act. She created
a comic persona – wild hair, flailing cigarette holder, splayed
feet, absurd costume, loud, cackling laugh – when in fact she was a
housewife from Ohio.
Although she made dozens of movies, including three in the 1960s
with Bob Hope (who also described her as "a Warhol mobile of spare
parts picked up along a freeway"), she was not really known in
Britain, except by reputation. She made a splash on Broadway when
she took over the lead in Hello, Dolly! for three months in the
1960s.
Her natural habitat was the comedy and cabaret
club, with stand-up appearances on US TV on the Tonight Show and
later the Ed Sullivan Show, where she developed a huge cult
following for her outrageous one-liners. You can still catch a
flavour of it all on the YouTube clips where
she auditions for the Spice Girls ("I want to be 65 again; the
way I looked when I was 30") or takes part in that bizarre
US
television habit of "roasting" a
much-loved celebrity ("Joan Collins was so popular as a
teenager, she was 21 before she discovered that cars had front
seats; since then, she's had 15 husbands, four of her own"). She
was the past master of the addled look, the slow burn, the dry
put-down.
She did channel her distinctive comedy schtick into a popular
television sitcom, broadcast in the UK in 1967, The Pruitts of
Southampton (Southampton, Long Island, that is). The Guardian
television critic of the time, Stanley Reynolds, noted a performer
who struck him as a cross between Imogene
Coca (a zany stalwart of Sid Caesar's and Carl Reiner's Your
Show of Shows) and Lucille Ball. Her character was a matriarch in a
family fallen on hard times: "Things are so tough, my daughter is
thinking of getting married just for the rice."
Born Phyllis Driver in Lima, Ohio, where her father was an
insurance agent, she was educated at Lima central high school and
studied the piano at the Sherwood Conservatory in Chicago before
moving on to Bluffton College in Ohio with the intention of
becoming a music teacher. There she met Sherwood Diller and they
married in 1939.
The Dillers moved to California and struggled to make a living,
Sherwood in a variety of jobs, Phyllis in local newspapers and as
an advertising copywriter, moving on to PR jobs and finally
regaling private parties with barbed accounts of life in the
kitchen. She made her professional debut at the Purple Onion, a San
Francisco nightclub, in 1955. By this time she thought she could be
as funny as the men she was watching on television. She achieved a
national breakthrough on Jack Paar's Tonight Show in 1958, after
battering at his door for a couple of years.
The Dillers divorced in 1965 and she married Warde Donovan in
the same year. While continuing as a stand-up on stage and small
screen, she developed a humorous musical act as the pianist Dame
Illya Dillya, appearing from 1971 for 10 years with symphony
orchestras across the US. She played for laughs, but also for real,
garnering fair reviews for her keyboard technique.
Her second marriage ended in divorce within a year, and she had
to settle out of court with her first husband's family over
accusations that she was libelling them in her act. Her routine
included a fictional husband called Fang, whose idea of a
seven-course dinner was a six-pack and a bologna sandwich: "The
last time I said let's eat out, we ate in the garage." From 1985
until his death in 1996, she was the partner of Bob Hastings. She
is survived by her son, Perry, and daughters, Suzanne and
Sally.
Diller's later life was dogged with medical problems, including
a heart attack in 1999. Her last big-time stand-up appearance was
in Las Vegas in 2002, and she was asked three years later if she
missed performing: "I don't miss the travel," she said. "I miss the
laughter. I do miss the actual hour … that hour is a high; it's as
good as you can feel. A wonderful, wonderful happiness, and great
power."
• Phyllis Ada Diller, comedian, born 17 July 1917; died 20
August 2012
