Actor, writer and director

Born: March 16, 1926;

Died: August 20, 2017

JERRY Lewis, who has died aged 91, was an odd sort of Hollywood superstar, a huge box-office draw in the 1950s and 1960s, but a throwback to an early age of knockabout slapstick comedy, whose very appeal was built on his awkwardness and stupidity.

He appealed to a large, teenage audience, but many mature viewers and critics both in the UK and in his native United States dismissed his comedy as puerile and unsophisticated clowning, with undigestible dollops of sentimentality thrown in – except in France, where he was lionised by influential high-brow critics and a public noted for its sophistication.

His early success in nightclubs, radio, television and films was as half of a double act with straight-man Dean Martin. Notwithstanding American critical disdain, they were ranked the Number One box-office stars in the annual Quigley poll of film exhibitors in 1952.

But within a few years there had been an acrimonious split. Lewis enjoyed further success on his own as a comic actor, writer and director. But by the end of the 20th century he had been largely forgotten, except in France of course.

The French passion for Lewis became a defining national characteristic and in 2006 Lewis was made a Commandeur of the Legion d’Honneur and the Minister of Culture called him “the French people’s favourite clown”.

He was born Joseph Levitch in Newark, New Jersey, in 1926, to Russian-Jewish parents, both of whom were in showbusiness. His mother played piano, his father worked in vaudeville and used the name Danny Lewis, so it was natural for the son to use that name too when he began performing with them as a young boy.

The name Joe or Joey Lewis caused confusion because of the similarity to the comedian Joe E Lewis and the boxer Joe Louis, so he became Jerry Lewis and was confused with the singer instead.

Lewis was 18 when he met Martin, nine years his senior, a former boxer, trying to make a career as a singer and showman. They were appearing at the same New York nightclub. Eventually they decided they should try a double act and made their debut in 1946 at a Mafia club in Atlantic City, where the owner told them in no uncertain terms that they had better improve.

“This was upper-scale Mafioso, a slash in the throat was like any afternoon,” said Lewis. “I never wrote better in my life.”

Martin would sing and Lewis would play a hopeless waiter, continually dropping plates and ruining Martin’s performance. Much of it was slapstick, some of it improvised, amounting to a sum total of mayhem, with Martin eventually chasing Lewis round the room. “We played to eight people in a room that sat 250,” said Lewis. “Two nights later there were 1,000 people looking to get in. That was the beginning.”

They made their television debut on the first episode of Ed Sullivan’s show in 1948. By the late 1940s they had their own radio show and sufficient clout to negotiate a deal with Paramount Pictures that gave them lots of money and artistic freedom.

But, as with so many double acts, there were tensions within the team. Lewis was the driving force. Martin was cool and laid back, Lewis manic, on-screen and off. On screen Lewis seemed like a little boy screaming out for attention and approval, never quite in control of his eyes, his tongue and his very body, hovering dangerously on the point of hysteria, while all the time craving love.

Lewis was variously star, writer, director and producer. His parts got bigger and Martin’s smaller. There was an infamous occasion in 1954 when a magazine used a publicity shot from their latest movie as its cover shot and cropped Martin out of the picture. By the time they made their 16th and final film together, Hollywood or Bust (1956), they were refusing to speak to each other off-set.

Both enjoyed successful solo careers. Lewis still ranked as one of Hollywood’s Top Ten box-office stars in the late 1950s and first half of the 1960s. He perfected his dangerously demented screen persona in The Nutty Professor (1963), a reworking of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde story of split personalities. Lewis co-wrote, directed and starred in it.

But his career faltered as he aged and tastes changed – though there was a 1996 Nutty Professor remake with Eddie Murphy. Latterly in the US he was probably better known for the exhausting Labor Day telethon that he hosted for muscular dystrophy for almost half a century.

Martin meanwhile had become an international singing star and he cemented his legend as a member of the Rat Pack and the original Ocean’s 11, 1960 vintage. Lewis and Martin would eventually reconcile. Martin died in 1995 and a decade later Lewis brought out a volume of memoirs entitled Dean and Me: A Love Story, in which he admitted that he had been a bully and that the partnership fell victim to his ego.

Lewis took his career and films very seriously and lectured at the University of Southern California. He encouraged the young Steven Spielberg and screened his 1968 short Amblin’ for students.

He wrote, directed and starred in the 1972 film The Day the Clown Cried, playing a clown who amuses Jewish children in a Nazi camp and eventually opts to go to the gas chambers with them. Harry Shearer, the comic actor, reckoned Lewis thought it could bring him awards recognition. But Shearer saw an early version and described it as “drastically wrong” and it was never released.

Lewis did surprise and impress many when Martin Scorsese cast him as Jerry Langford, a popular talk-show host, kidnapped by Robert De Niro’s talentless wannabe, in The King of Comedy (1983). His hard-edged performance brought him a British Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor. Lewis was married twice and had seven children.

BRIAN PENDREIGH