Joan Alexandra Molinsky (previously Rosenberg; June 8, 1933 – September 4, 2014), known by her stage name Joan Rivers, was an American actress, comedian, writer, producer and television host, best known for her stand-up comedy, for co-hosting the E! celebrity fashion show Fashion Police, and for starring in the reality series Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best? alongside her daughter Melissa Rivers.

Rivers first came to prominence in 1965 as a guest on The Tonight Show, a pioneering late-night program with interviews and comedy, hosted by Johnny Carson, whom she acknowledges as her mentor. The show established her particular comic style, poking fun at celebrities, but also at herself, often joking about her extensive plastic surgery. When she launched a rival program, The Late Show, he never spoke to her again. She went on to host a successful daytime slot, The Joan Rivers Show, which won her a Daytime Emmy for Outstanding Talk Show Host. Her satirical style of humor, however, by focusing on the personal lives of celebrities and public figures, has sometimes been criticized. She was also the author of 12 best-sellingmemoir and humor books, as well as providing comic material for stage and television.

On September 4, 2014, Rivers died following serious complications—including cardiac arrest—that arose during throat surgery at a clinic inYorkville on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Early life and education

Rivers was born Joan Alexandra Molinsky in Brooklyn, New York in 1933,[4]the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants Beatrice (née Grushman; January 6, 1906 – October 1975) and Meyer C. Molinsky (December 7, 1900 – January 1985). Her older sister Barbara died on June 3, 2013, aged 82. She was raised in Brooklyn, New York, and her family later moved to Larchmont, in Westchester County, New York. She attended Connecticut College between 1950 and 1952 and graduated Phi Beta Kappa fromBarnard College in 1954 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature and anthropology. Before entering show business, Rivers worked at various jobs such as a tour guide at Rockefeller Center, a writer/proofreader at an advertising agency and as a fashion consultant atBond Clothing Stores. During this period, agent Tony Rivers advised her to change her name, so she chose Joan Rivers as her stage name.

Career

1950s–1960s

During the late 1950s, Rivers appeared in a short-run play, Driftwood, playing a lesbian with a crush on a character played by a then-unknownBarbra Streisand. The play ran for six weeks. Rivers performed in numerous comedy clubs in the Greenwich Village area of New York City in the early 1960s, including The Bitter End and The Gaslight Cafe, before making her first appearances as a guest on the TV program The Tonight Show originating from New York, hosted at the time by Jack Paar.

By 1965, Rivers had a stint on Candid Camera as a gag writer and participant; she was "the bait" to lure people into ridiculous situations for the show. She also made her first appearance on The Tonight Show with new host Johnny Carson, on February 17, 1965. During the same decade, Rivers made other appearances on The Tonight Showas well as The Ed Sullivan Show, while hosting the first of several talk shows. She wrote material for the puppet Topo Gigio. She had a brief role in The Swimmer (1968), starringBurt Lancaster. A year later, she had a short-lived syndicated daytime talk show, That Show with Joan Rivers; Johnny Carson was her first guest. In the middle of the 1960s, she released at least two comedy albums, The Next to Last Joan Rivers Album andRivers Presents Mr. Phyllis & Other Funny Stories.

1970s

By the 1970s, Rivers was appearing on various television comedy and variety shows, including The Carol Burnett Show and a semi-regular stint on Hollywood Squares. From 1972 to 1976, she narrated The Adventures of Letterman, an animated segment for The Electric Company. In 1973, Rivers wrote the TV movie The Girl Most Likely to..., a black comedy starring Stockard Channing. In 1978, Rivers wrote and directed the film Rabbit Test, starring her friend Billy Crystal. During the same decade, she was the opening act for singers Helen Reddy, Robert Goulet, Mac Davis and Sergio Franchi on the Las Vegas Strip.

1980s–1990s

Rivers spoke of her primary Tonight Show life as having been Johnny Carson's daughter, a reference to his longtime mentoring of her and, during the 1980s, establishing her as his regular guest host by August 1983. She also hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live, on April 9, 1983.[19] In the same period, she released a best-selling comedy album onGeffen Records, What Becomes a Semi-Legend Most? The album reached No. 22 on the U.S. Billboard 200 and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album.

During the 1980s she continued doing stand-up shows along with appearing on various television shows. In February 1983, she became the first female comedian to ever perform at Carnegie Hall. Later that year, she did stand-up on the United Kingdom's tv show, "An Audience With Joan Rivers".

In 1984, Rivers published a best-selling humor book, The Life and Hard Times of Heidi Abramowitz, a mock memoir of her brassy, loose comedy character. A television special based on the character, a mock tribute called Joan Rivers and Friends Salute Heidi Abramowitz, was not successful with the public.

The decade was controversial for Rivers. She sued female impersonator Frank Marino for $5,000,000 in 1986, after discovering he was using her real stand-up material in the impersonation of her that he included in his popular Las Vegas act. The two comics reconciled, even appearing together on television in later years.

Also in 1986 came the move that cost Rivers her longtime friendship with Carson, who had first hired her as a Tonight Show writer. The soon-to-launch Fox Television Networkannounced that it was giving her a late night talk show, The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers, making Rivers the first woman to have her own talk show.

The new network planned to broadcast the show 11:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. Eastern Time, making her a Carson competitor. Carson learned of the show from Fox and not from Rivers herself. In the documentary Johnny Carson: King of Late Night,Rivers said she only called Carson to discuss the matter after learning he may have already heard about it, and that he immediately hung up on her. In the same interview, she said that she later came to believe that maybe she should have asked for his blessing before taking the job. Rivers was banned from appearing on the Tonight Show, a decision respected by Carson's first two successors Jay Leno and Conan O'Brien.

After the release of his 2013 biography on Johnny Carson, Carson's manager Harry Bushkin revealed that he never received a call from Rivers's husband Edgar concerning the move to Fox, against Rivers's prior knowledge. Rivers did not appear on the Tonight Show again until February 17, 2014, when she made a brief appearance on new host Jimmy Fallon's first episode.[27] On March 27, 2014, Rivers returned for an interview.

Shortly after Carson's death in 2005, Rivers said that he never spoke to her again. In 2008, during an interview with Dr.Pamela Connolly on television's Shrink Rap, Rivers claimed she did call Carson, but he hung up on her at once and repeated the gesture when she called again.

The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers turned out to be flecked by tragedy. When Rivers challenged Fox executives, who wanted to fire her husband Edgar Rosenberg as the show's producer, the network fired them both. On May 15, 1987, three months later, Rosenberg committed suicide in Philadelphia; Rivers blamed the tragedy on his "humiliation" by Fox. Fox attempted to continue the show with a new name (The Late Show) and rotating guest hosts. A year after theLate Show debacle, Rivers was a guest on TV's Pee-wee's Playhouse Christmas Special. By 1989, she tried another daytime TV talk show, The Joan Rivers Show, which ran for five years and won her an Daytime Emmy in 1990 for Outstanding Talk Show Host. In 1994, Rivers and daughter Melissa first hosted the E! Entertainment Television pre-awards show for the Golden Globe Awards.

 Beginning in 1995, they hosted the annual E! Entertainment Television pre-awards show for the Academy Awards. Beginning in 1997, Rivers hosted her own radio show on WOR in New York City. Rivers also appeared as one of the center square occupants on the 1986–89 version of The Hollywood Squares, hosted by John Davidson.

In 1994, Rivers—who was influenced by the "dirty comedy" of Lenny Bruce—co-wrote and starred in a play about Bruce's mother Sally Marr, who was also a stand-up comic and influenced her son's development as a comic. After 27 previews, "Sally Marr...and Her Escorts," a play "suggested by the life of Sally Marr" ran on Broadway for 50 performances in May and June 1994. Rivers was nominated for a Drama Desk Award as Outstanding Actress in a Play and a Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for playing Sally Marr.

2000s–2010s

By 2003, Rivers had left her E! red-carpet show for a three-year contract (valued at $6–8 million) to cover award shows' red carpet events for the TV Guide Channel.

Rivers appeared in three episodes of the TV show Nip/Tuck during its second, third andseventh season playing herself. Rivers appears regularly on television's The Shopping Channel (in Canada) and QVC (in both the United States and the UK), promoting her own line of jewelry under brand name "The Joan Rivers Collection". She was also a guest speaker at the opening of the American Operating Room Nurses' 2000 San Francisco Conference. Both Joan and Melissa Rivers are frequent guests on Howard Stern's radio show, and Joan Rivers often appears as a guest on UK panel show 8 Out of 10 Cats.

Rivers was one of only four Americans invited to the Wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales, and Camilla Parker Bowles on April 9, 2005. On August 16, 2007, Rivers began a two-week workshop of her new play, with the working title "The Joan Rivers Theatre Project", at The Magic Theatre in San Francisco. On December 3, 2007, Rivers performed in the Royal Variety Show 2007 at the Liverpool Empire Theatre, England, with Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip present.

In January 2008, Rivers became one of 20 hijackers to take control of the Big Brother house in the UK for one day in spin-off TV show Big Brother: Celebrity Hijack. On June 24, 2008, Rivers appeared on NBC-TV’s show Celebrity Family Feud and competed with her daughter against Ice-T and Coco.

 

Rivers and daughter Melissa were contestants in 2009 on the second Celebrity Apprentice. Throughout the season, each celebrity raised money for a charity of his or her choice; Rivers selected God's Love We Deliver. After afalling out with poker player Annie Duke, following Melissa's on-air firing (elimination) by Donald Trump, Rivers left the green room telling Clint Black and Jesse James that she would not be in the next morning. Rivers later returned to the show and on May 3, 2009, she became a finalist in the series. The other finalist was Duke. On the season finale, which aired live on May 10, Rivers was announced the winner and hired to be the 2009 Celebrity Apprentice.

Rivers was featured on the show Z Rock as herself and was also a special so-called pink-carpet presenter for the 2009 broadcast of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras parade. She was alsoroasted in a Comedy Central special, taped on July 26, 2009, and aired on August 9, 2009. From August 2009, Rivers began starring in the new reality TV series How'd You Get So Rich? on TV Land. A documentary film about Rivers, Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, premiered at the San Francisco International Film Festival at the Castro Theatre on May 6, 2010. In 2011, Rivers appeared in a commercial for Go Daddy, which debuted during the broadcast of Super Bowl XLV. To date, Joan has made two appearances on Live at the Apollo, once as a comedian and once as a guest host.

Joan and her daughter Melissa Rivers premiered the new show Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best? on WE tv. The series follows Joan moving to California to be closer to her family. She moves in with daughter Melissa while searching for a home of her own. WE tv then ordered a new season consisting of 10 episodes, which premiered in January 2012. In 2011, Rivers was featured as herself in Season 2 of Louis C.K.'s self-titled show Louie, where she performed on-stage.

Since September 10, 2010, Rivers has co-hosted the E! show Fashion Police, along with Giuliana Rancic, Kelly Osbourne and George Kotsiopouloscommenting on the dos and don'ts of celebrity fashion. The show started as a half-hour program, but expanded to one hour on March 9, 2012. On August 7, 2012, Rivers showed up in Burbank, California to protest that the warehouse-club Costco would not sell her New York Times best-selling book, I Hate Everyone ... Starting with Me. She handcuffed herself to a person's shopping cart and shouted through a megaphone. The police were called to the scene and she left without incident and no arrests were made. On March 5, 2013, Joan launched a new online talk show called In Bed with Joan through YouTube, in which each week she has a different celebrity guest that "comes out of the closet" and they talk about various topics. The show takes place in Joan's bedroom, which is in Melissa's house in Malibu, California.

On August 26, 2014, Rivers hosted a taping of Fashion Police with Kelly Osbourne, Giuliana Rancic, and George Kotsiopoulos about the 66th Primetime Emmy Awards and the 2014 MTV Movie Awards which would be her last television appearance before her incident.

The day before her throat surgery, she released her most recent podcast of In Bed with Joan with LeAnn Rimes and Eddie Cibrian.

Her style of humor, which often relied on making jokes about her own life and satirizing the lives of celebrities and public figures, has sometimes been criticized for being insensitive. Her jokes about Elizabeth Taylor's and Adele's weight, for instance, were often commented on, although she would never apologize for her humor. Rivers, who is Jewish, was also criticized for making jokes about the Holocaust, and later explained, "This is the way I remind people about the Holocaust. I do it through humor," adding, "my husband lost his entire family in the Holocaust."  

Her joke about the victims of the Ariel Castro kidnappings, similarly came under criticism, but she again refused to apologize, stating, "I know what those girls went through. It was a little stupid joke." Rivers accepts such criticism as part of her using social satire as a form of humor: "I've learned to have absolutely no regrets about any jokes I've ever done. . . You can tune me out, you can click me off, it's OK. I am not going to bow to political correctness. But you do have to learn, if you want to be a satirist, you can't be part of the party."

Personal life

Rivers was a member of the Reform synagogue Temple Emanu-El in New York, and has stated publicly that she "love[d] Israel."

Rivers's first marriage was in 1955 to James Sanger, the son of a Bond Clothing Stores merchandise manager. The marriage lasted six months and was annulled on the basis that Sanger did not want children and had not informed Rivers before the wedding. Her second marriage was on July 15, 1965, to Edgar Rosenberg, who committed suicide in 1987. Their only child, Melissa Warburg Rosenberg (now known as Melissa Rivers), was born on January 20, 1968. She has one grandson, Melissa's son Cooper (born Edgar Cooper Endicott in 2000) who is featured with his mother and grandmother in the WE tv series Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best?

In her book, Bouncing Back (1997), she described how she developed bulimia and contemplated suicide. Eventually, she recovered with counseling and the support of her family. In 2002, Rivers told the Montreal Mirror that she was aRepublican. However, on a 2013 episode of Celebrity Wife Swap, Rivers stated that she was a Democrat. Then on January 28, 2014, during a conversation with Reza Farahan she announced that she was in fact a Republican.

In a June 5, 2012, interview with Howard Stern, Rivers said she had several extramarital affairs when married to Rosenberg. According to Rivers, she had a one-night sexual encounter with actor Robert Mitchum in the 1960s after an appearance together on The Tonight Show. She also had an extended affair with actor Gabriel Dell during the out-of-town and Broadway productions of her play, Fun City, in 1971, for which Rivers told Stern she "left Edgar over" for several weeks.

Rivers was open about her multiple cosmetic surgeries, and was a patient of plastic surgeon Steven Hoefflin beginning in 1983. Her first procedure, an eye lift, was performed in 1965 as an attempt to further her career.

Death

On August 28, 2014, Rivers experienced serious complications—including stopping breathing—during throat surgery at a clinic in Yorkville, Manhattan. She was taken to Mount Sinai Hospital and was put into a medically induced comaafter reportedly entering cardiac arrest. On August 29, her daughter, Melissa, publicly stated that she was "resting comfortably" in the hospital.

On August 30, it was reported Rivers had been put on life support.

Reports initially stated that Rivers' family might face ending her life support if her condition did not improve.

However, on September 1, 2014, an unnamed source told Entertainment Tonight that Rivers' physicians at Mount Sinai Hospital had started the process of trying to bring her out of the coma on August 31. Prior to that, there had been no further medical updates beyond her daughter's statement. On September 3, Melissa Rivers issued a brief statement that Rivers had been moved from Mount Sinai Hospital's ICU into a private room, without any comment concerning Rivers's condition or prognosis.

The following day, September 4, 2014, Melissa announced via another statement that Rivers had died at the age of 81 at 1:17 p.m.