Phyllis Diller, 1917-2012

Diller on her album cover (1962). Photo credit - LOC

A comedian, actress, recording artist, and author. One of the first female stand-up comics.

Born Phyllis Ada Driver in Lima, Ohio. Growing up with old parents (her father was 55, and her mother was 35 when she was born), she was exposed to death from a young age. Later she said that this had led her to appreciate life and use comedy as a therapy method.

After graduating from Lima’s Central High School, she studied piano at the Sherwood Music Conservatory of Columbia College Chicago and then history, literature, philosophy, and psychology at Bluffton College.

In Bluffton, she met Sherwood Diller, and the couple eloped in 1939. After the wedding, she dropped out of school, became a housewife, and cared for their five children.

In 1952, after the family moved to Alameda, CA, Diller began to work at KROW radio in Oakland, CA. That same year, she filmed a series of 15-minute segments for the Bay Area TV station titled Phyllis Dillis, the Homely Friendmaker, offering absurd advice to homemakers.

In 1955, at 37, she worked as a vocalist for a music-review TV show called Pop Club. The hosts, Don Sherwood and Willard Anderson, found her hilarious and invited her to the show. Following her success, she debuted as a stand-up comedian at San Francisco’s The Purple Onion nightclub. Diller’s perfect timing, cackling laugh, and pin-point one-liners about suburban life captivated the audience, and the show ran for almost two years.

With no female comedians as role models in a male-dominated industry, Diller’s first performances draw materials from her experiences as a housewife who reads advice columns. Over time, she developed a persona, presenting a caricaturist form of femininity. With baggy dresses, clownish hairstyles, and a fake cigarette, she ridiculed her lack of sex appeal and spoke about looks, ineptitude as a mother, and her made-up husband. Later, she also joked about her love of plastic surgery.

In 1958, at 41, Diller made her first national television appearance on Groucho Marx’s show You Bet Your Life. Afterward, she got invited to various talk shows, including the Tonight Show and The Ed Sullivan Show, bringing her national fame; her performances were fully booked throughout the US, and she released multiple comedy albums.

By the early 1960s, she began to perform alongside her mentor Bob Hope, appearing in more than 20 of his TV specials and working with him on several films, including Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! Eight on the Lam, and The Private Navy of Sgt. O’Farrell.

By then, Diller became a household name, regularly appearing on numerous television programs. She also furthered her acting career, performing in over a dozen movies and as a dubbing artist, utilizing her signature voice to portray a wide range of characters, from the Monster’s Mate in the 1967 film Mad Monster Party to the Queen in the 1998 animation A Bug’s Life.

In 1966, 49 years old Diller received her own TV show, The Pruitts of Southampton, better known as The Phyllis Diller Show. There, she played a wacky widow who struggles to maintain an appearance of wealth despite being heavily in debt.

During the next three decades, Diller continued to appear in many TV shows and to voice act in several series, including Robot Chicken, Family Guy, Cow and Chicken, Hey Arnold!, The Powerpuff Girls and Animaniacs.

She was also an accomplished writer, publishing her first book, Phyllis Diller’s Housekeeping Hints, in 1966 and her last, The Joys of Aging & How to Avoid Them, in 1981.

By the end of the 1990s, while in her 80s, her health began to decline, and in 2002 she retired from stand-up. She continued to make TV appearances and was featured in talk shows and comedy specials such as The Aristocrats.

Diller died at 95, after a 50-year-long career in which she published four books and appeared in 365 films and dozens of TV shows. As one of the first solo female comedians in the US, she inspired generations of stand-up comedians, such as Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, Ellen DeGeneres, and Margaret Cho.

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“A smile is a curve that sets everything straight.”

“A smile is a curve that sets everything straight.”

Fun Facts

  • She claims that 7 is her lucky number; she was born on 7-7-17.
  • She was twice divorced and had a ten years relationship with lawyer Robert Hastings. She had six children with her first husband; five survived to adulthood.
    She collected Waterford crystals.
  • In the early 60s, Barbra Streisand was her opening act.
  • During the 70s, she performed as a piano soloist with symphony orchestras across the US under the stage name Dame Illya Dillya.
  • She was a self-taught artist, working with oils, watercolors, and acrylics. In 2003, at 86, she held her first art party, selling her artwork, clothes, and costume jewelry.
  • Joan Rivers wrote jokes for her act.
  • The character of Sophie Lennon from the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is based on her.
  • The 2004 documentary film Goodnight, We Love You: The Life and Legend of Phyllis Diller follows her during the night of her last performance.
  • Her autobiography is titled Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse – My Life in Comedy.
  • She gave the National Museum of American History some of her most iconic costumes, her gag file, and a cabinet with more than 50,000 jokes she had written during her career.
  • Alameda, California, declared her birthday, July 17th, Phyllis Diller Day.
  • She served as an honorary of Brentwood, California.

Awards

  • Golden Apple Award for Most Cooperative Actress (1966)
  • Laurel Award (1967)
  • Awarded Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (1975)
  • Women's International Center Living Legacy Award (1990)
  • American Comedy Award (1992)
  • Inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame (1993)
  • The Lucy Award (2000)
  • San Diego Film Festival Governor's Award (2004)

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Category: Theater & Cinema
Tags: Actress, Author, and Comedienne

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Ada Louise Huxtable WWP
Arts

Ada Louise Huxtable, 1921-2013

An architecture critic and a writer. Received the first-ever Pulitzer Prize for Criticism.

Born Ada Louise Landman in NYC, an only child in a middle-class Jewish family. Growing up in Manhattan, Huxtable loved strolling along the streets, fascinated by its building, such as the Grand Central Terminal, the Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Natural History. She studied art at Hunter College, graduating magna cum laude, and then architectural history at NYU Institute of Fine Arts. At the time, she worked in Bloomingdale’s furnishings department, where she met her soon-to-be husband, Garth Huxtable. In 1946, at 25, Huxtable landed a job as an assistant curator of architecture and design at the Museum of Modern Art. After five years, she left her job to study Italian architecture in Italy for a year. Upon her return, she began writing as a contributing editor for various art and architectural journals. At the age of 37, she received a Guggenheim Fellowship, in which she examined the structural and design advances of American architecture. In 1963, 42 years old Huxtable was hired as the first architecture critic at The New York Times, a position she held for almost 20 years. In her column, she wrote about new and old buildings, threatened buildings, and bad-designed buildings. She also mentioned emerging architects, architectural trends, movements, and exhibitions. Huxtable encouraged the everyday readers to look at buildings from a new perspective, not as an assembly of bricks and pilasters but as a public statement with history and meaning. Raising awareness of the city’s heritage, the urban environment, and civic engagement, she set the tone for modern architecture criticism, for which, at the age of 49, she was the first-ever to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. In 1981, at the age of 60, Huxtable received a MacArthur grant that allowed her in-depth research on subjects she was interested in, such as the development of the skyscraper, the negative impact of postmodernism building, and preservation vs. modernity. At 76, she returned to writing for the public as an architecture critic for The Wall Street Journal, publishing columns for the next 15 years. Throughout her career, Huxtable was involved in various committees, serving as a fellow at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Architectural Selection and Building Design Committees for the Getty Center, Getty Villa, and as a Jury member for The Pritzker Architecture Prize. She published more than 10 books on architecture, including “Kicked a Building Lately?,” “Goodbye History,” “Hello Hamburger,” and a biography of Frank Lloyd Wright. Huxtable died in NYC at 91. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Agatha Christie WWP
Literature & Poetry

Agatha Christie, 1890-1976

English author and playwright. Known as the Queen of Mystery for her detective novels.

Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller was born in Torquay, England, into a middle-class family. In her early years, she was homeschooled by her parents and taught herself to read at the age of five, against her mother’s wish. In 1901, at 10, she wrote her first poem, “The Cow Slip.” That same year, her father died, and not long after, her mother remarried, and the family moved to Cheadle, Cheshire. She began to receive formal education at Miss Guyer’s Girls’ School but had trouble adjusting to the strict environment. At 15, she was sent to a boarding school in Paris, where she mainly had piano lessons and vocal training. Following her return to England, she began writing short stories reflecting her interest in spiritualism and the paranormal. These include The Call of Wings, and The House of Beauty, later published as The House of Dreams. In addition, she began working on her first novel, Snow Upon the Desert, which she tried to publish under a pseudonym but got rejected by six different publishers. In 1912, at 22, she began a relationship with a military officer named Archie Christie. At the outbreak of World War I, he was sent to fight in France, and the couple had to wait for his home leave to get married. During the war, she volunteered as a nurse at the Voluntary Aid Detachment of the Red Cross. There, she met many Belgian soldiers, which inspired her to create the character of Hercule Poirot – a former Belgian police officer “with a magnificent mustache.” He appeared in Christie’s first detective novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, as the distinguished detective and later in 25 more novels and numerous short stories. That first novel was written in 1916 but was published only in 1920 after Christie signed a six books contract with The Bodley Head publication. After the war, Christie and her husband moved to London, and in 1919 she gave birth to her daughter Rosalind. She continued to write thrillers and murder mystery stories, developing new detective characters, such as Tommy and Tuppence in The Secret Adversary and Miss Jane Marple in the short story collection The Thirteen Problems. In 1926, she published The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which was an immediate best-seller, and years later was voted the best crime novel ever by the British Crime Writers’ Association. Despite her literary success, she dealt with personal issues. First, her mother died, and then her husband filed for divorce after falling in love with another woman. On December 3rd, 1926, following a fight with her husband, Christie left the house without saying where she was going. The next morning, her car was found abandoned, and the mysterious disappearance of the author became a news sensation. Thousand police officers and 15,000 volunteers searched for her. The author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, gave a medium one of Christie’s gloves to locate her, and a newspaper offered a £100 reward to the person who would find her. Eleven days later, Christie got recognized in a hotel in Yorkshire, where she registered under the last name of her husband’s lover. She suffered from amnesia and couldn’t recall who she was or how she got to Yorkshire. After the incident, she moved to London with her daughter, received psychiatric treatment, and divorced. In 1928, at 38, she took the Orient Express to Istanbul and then continued to Baghdad. While visiting the archaeological site at Ur, she befriended the archaeologist Leonard Woolley, who invited her back the following year. Then, she met the archaeologist Max Mallowan, 13 years her junior. After they married, she joined him on his archaeological expeditions in the Middle East, which inspired many of her stories, such as the 1934 novel Murder on the Orient Express. She continued to publish more novels and short stories, and in 1943, after she disliked a stage adaption of one of her novels, she began to adapt her stories into plays. In the early 1970s, her health began to decline. She published her last novel in 1973 and made her last public appearance in 1974. She died two years later at the age of 85. During her life, she wrote 74 novels (66 of them are detective stories), 14 short-stories collections, 19 plays, and an autobiography. Dozens of her works got adapted into films, TV series, and stage plays. Her books have been translated into over 100 languages and sold over 300 million copies worldwide. In 1976, at the time of her death, she was the best-selling novelist in history.   Dive deeper into the inspiring story of Agatha Christie with our fun and engaging printable worksheet! Available now on Etsy and Teachers Pay Teachers.   This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Alice Walker WWP
Literature & Poetry

Alice Walker, 1944

A novelist, poet, and social activist. The first African-American woman to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker was born in Eatonton, Georgia, the youngest of eight children of sharecroppers. At 8, she was injured in her eye after her brother played with a BB gun, causing her permanent blindness in one eye. The mark on her eye made her an easy target to her classmates, so she turned to poetry for comfort. Growing up in the segregated south, she attended an only black kids’ high school, from which she graduated valedictorian. Her high scores granted her a full scholarship to Spelman College, where she studied for two years before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College in NYC. In this period, Walker had an abortion which caused her suicidal thoughts. She wrote all about it in her poems. In 1965, at the age of 21, Walker moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and became active in the civil rights movement. She worked for the Legal Defense Fund of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and as a consultant in black history to the Friends of the Children of Mississippi Head Start program while serving as writer-in-residence in various academic institutes publishing essays and short stories. At 23, she married Melvyn Rosenman Leventhal, a Jewish civil rights attorney. At the time, interracial marriage was illegal in the south, and the couple had to travel to NYC to get married. On their return, they became the first legally married interracial couple in Mississippi since 1822, when the miscegenation laws passed. During their nine years of marriage, they suffered recurring harassment from the Ku Klux Klan. In 1970, at 26, Walker published her first novel, The Third Life of Grange Copeland, following the life of an abusive sharecropper husband and father. Three years later, she was appointed editor of Ms. Magazine, published her second poetry collection and her first collection of short stories. In 1976, Walker returned to NYC and published her second novel Meridian, about several civil rights activists in the south during the 1960s. In the late 1970s, she moved to California, where she wrote her best-known work, The Color Purple. Published in 1982, the novel explores the struggles of a black woman in the racist and patriarchal society of 1900s Georgia. The book was a best-seller, and in the following year, 39 years old Walker became the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Later the novel was adapted into a film featuring Oprah Winfrey and Whoopi Goldberg and a Broadway musical produced by Quincy Jones and Oprah Winfrey. In 1984, she co-founded the feminist publishing company Wild Tree Press. She deepened the world of some of her characters from The Color Purple in two of her novels, The Temple of My Familiar and Possessing the Secret of Joy, and created new characters that allowed her to delve into other social issues, such as female sexuality in By the Light of My Father’s Smile from 1998, and identity questions in Now Are the Time to Open Your Heart from 2005. Throughout the decades, Walker published seven novels, ten poetry collections, four short stories collections, four children’s books, and a dozen collections of essays and articles. In all of her work, Walker deals with the struggles of black people, especially women, and their experiences in sexist, racist, and violent surroundings. Often using Black vernacular, which highlights the hundreds of years of slavery and oppression, she had dealt with complex topics such as rape, isolation, bisexuality, and troubled relationships within the black community. Walker is a long-time social and political activist, promoting and fighting for various causes, from black and women’s rights to environmental issues, Palestinians’ fight for independence, and the elimination of female genital mutilation. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
Alicia-Keys-WWP
Music

Alicia Keys, 1981

Grammy award-winning singer-songwriter, producer, and actress.

Born as Alicia Augello Cook in Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood in NYC. Her father left when she was 2 years old, and she was raised mainly by her mother. As a child living in a rough neighborhood, Keys was exposed to drugs, prostitution, and street violence. She credits her mother for leading her to the right path, supporting her interest in music and performance, which began at a young age. In preschool, she sang in her school’s productions, and at the age of 6, began classical training, practicing the piano six hours a day. At 12, Keys wrote and composed her first song. Two years later, she began studying jazz. After graduating at age 16 as valedictorian from the Professional Performance Arts School, she signed a deal with the record producer Clive Davis, first at Arista Records and later at J Records. In 2001, 20-year-old Keys released her debut album “Songs in A Minor”, which included the #1 hit “Fallin”. The album sold more than 12 million copies worldwide, and Keys won 5 Grammy awards. Four years later, Keys released her second album, “The Diary of Alicia Keys”, for which she won 4 Grammys, including best album award and best song award, and for her 3rd album “As I Am”, Keys won 3 more Grammys. Throughout the years, Keys continued to release #1 hits, including “No One”, “Empire State of Mind”, and “Girl on Fire”. Overall between 2001 to 2016, Keys released 6 studio albums, 2 live albums, and 1 EP. In addition to being an acclaimed musician, Keys is also an actress. She acted in various films and TV shows, including “Empire”, “SNL”, “Smokin’ Aces”, and “The Secret Life of Bees”. She is also a film producer and directed one out of five segments of the movie “Five”. In 2004, Keys co-founded and became the global ambassador of ‘Keep a Child Alive’ – a non-profit organization providing medicines in Africa for HIV and AIDS. Alicia Keys is a women empowerment icon; her point of view can often be found in her lyrics as well as in the #nomakeup campaign she launched. In 2016 Keys wrote an essay in which she stated that she lost herself behind eyeliners and lipsticks, and since she is make-up free, she feels more beautiful than ever. She is encouraging other women to discover themselves without the masks. This post is also available in: Español Read more...
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