Phyllis Ada Diller was an American stand-up comedian, actress, author, musician, and visual artist, best known for her eccentric stage persona, self-deprecating humor, wild hair and clothes, and exaggerated, cackling laugh.
50 Facts About Phyllis Diller
2.
Phyllis Diller had a large gay following and is considered a gay icon.
3.
Phyllis Diller was one of the first celebrities to openly champion plastic surgery, for which she was recognized by the cosmetic surgery industry.
4.
Phyllis Diller contributed to more than 40 films, beginning with 1961's Splendor in the Grass.
5.
Phyllis Diller appeared in many television series, featuring in numerous cameos as well as her own short-lived sitcom and variety show.
6.
Phyllis Diller's voice-acting roles included the monster's wife in Mad Monster Party, the Queen in A Bug's Life, Granny Neutron in The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, and Thelma Griffin in Family Guy.
7.
Phyllis Diller was raised Methodist but later became an atheist.
8.
Phyllis Diller's father and mother were older than most when she was born and Diller attended several funerals while growing up.
9.
Phyllis Diller attended Lima's Central High School and discovered she had the gift of humor early on.
10.
Phyllis Diller studied piano for three years at the Sherwood Music Conservatory of Columbia College Chicago but decided against a music career and transferred to Bluffton College where she studied literature, history, psychology, and philosophy.
11.
Phyllis Diller met Sherwood Diller at Bluffton and they married in 1939.
12.
Phyllis Diller did not finish school and was primarily a homemaker, taking care of their five children.
13.
Phyllis Diller worked as a copywriter at KSFO radio in San Francisco and a vocalist for a music-review TV show called Pop Club, hosted by Don Sherwood.
14.
Phyllis Diller's first professional show was a success and the two-week booking stretched out to 89 consecutive weeks.
15.
Phyllis Diller had found her calling and eventual financial success while her husband's business career failed.
16.
Phyllis Diller wrote her own material and kept a file cabinet full of her gags, honing her nightclub act.
17.
Phyllis Diller accompanied Hope to Vietnam in 1966 with his USO troupe near the height of the Vietnam War.
18.
Phyllis Diller made regular cameo appearances, making her trademark wisecracks on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In.
19.
Self-deprecating to a fault, a typical Phyllis Diller joke had her running after a garbage truck pulling away from her curb.
20.
Phyllis Diller continued to work in film, making an appearance as Texas Guinan, the wisecracking nightclub hostess in Splendor in the Grass.
21.
Phyllis Diller began a career in voice work, providing the voice of the Monster's Mate in Mad Monster Party.
22.
Diller starred in the short-lived TV series The Pruitts of Southampton ; later retitled The Phyllis Diller Show, a half-hour sitcom on ABC.
23.
Phyllis Diller received a Golden Globe nomination in 1967 for her role in Pruitts.
24.
Phyllis Diller continued working in television throughout the '70s and '80s, appearing as a judge on premiere and subsequent episodes of The Gong Show and as a panelist on the Match Game PM show.
25.
Phyllis Diller guest-starred in The Mouse Factory, Night Gallery, Love American Style, The Muppet Show, CHiPs and The Love Boat.
26.
In 1998, Phyllis Diller provided the voice of the Queen in A Bug's Life.
27.
Phyllis Diller played Peter Griffin's mother, Thelma, on Family Guy in 2006.
28.
Phyllis Diller, who avoided blue comedy, did a version of an old, risque vaudeville routine, in which she describes herself passing out when she first heard the joke, forgetting the actual content of the joke.
29.
On January 24,2007, Phyllis Diller appeared on The Tonight Show and performed stand-up before chatting with Jay Leno.
30.
Phyllis Diller had studied the piano for many years and was an accomplished player but decided against a career in music after hearing her teachers and mentors play with much more skill than she thought that she would be able to achieve.
31.
Phyllis Diller still played in her private life and owned a custom-made harpsichord.
32.
Between 1971 and 1981, Phyllis Diller appeared as a piano soloist with symphony orchestras across the country under the stage name Dame Illya Dillya.
33.
Phyllis Diller's performances were spiced with humor, but she took the music seriously.
34.
Phyllis Diller worked in acrylics, watercolors, and oils throughout the 1970s and filled her Brentwood, California home with her portraits and still lifes.
35.
Phyllis Diller had six children from her marriage with her first husband Sherwood Anderson Diller, and she outlived two of her grown children.
36.
Phyllis Diller filed for divorce three months later, having found him to be bisexual and alcoholic, though they reconciled on the day before the divorce was to become final.
37.
Phyllis Diller portrayed herself as a horrible cook in her stand-up routines, but she was reputed to be an excellent cook.
38.
Phyllis Diller licensed her recipe for chili and sold it nationally as "Phyllis Diller Chili".
39.
Phyllis Diller candidly discussed her plastic surgery, a series of procedures first undertaken when she was 55, and she wrote that she had undergone 15 procedures.
40.
Phyllis Diller was fitted with a pacemaker but had a bad drug reaction and became paralyzed.
41.
Phyllis Diller died at her home in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles on the morning of August 20,2012, at the age of 95.
42.
Phyllis Diller was cremated, and her ashes were scattered at sea.
43.
Phyllis Diller was one of the first solo female comedians in the US to become a household name.
44.
Phyllis Diller stated that making people laugh is a powerful art form.
45.
Phyllis Diller herself was influenced by comedy books and appropriated from sources like The Lockhorns.
46.
Phyllis Diller was a victorious loser hero, the female iteration of Chaplin's Little Tramp.
47.
Phyllis Diller had the anger that is in all of us.
48.
Phyllis Diller was an outspoken proponent of plastic surgery at a time when cosmetic procedures were secretive.
49.
In 2003, after hearing of the donation of Archie Bunker's chair to the Smithsonian Institution, Phyllis Diller opened her doors to the National Museum of American History.
50.
Phyllis Diller offered them some of her most iconic costume pieces, as well as her gag file, a steel cabinet with 48 file drawers with more than 50,000 jokes she had written on index cards during her career.