Phyllis Diller

Further, a screenplay about Diller's early years in showbiz is in preproduction and actress Patricia Clarkson is slated to play Diller, for a film due in 2006. Elsie Ferguson was interred in the Duck River Cemetery in Old Lyme, Connecticut. In an appearance on CNN's Larry King Live talk show in December of 2004, Diller announced that an authorized biography of her life is in the works. A very wealthy woman with no heirs, and a lover of animals, on her passing in 1961 she left a large part of her considerable estate to a variety of charities including several for animal welfare. She has since officially retired from standup performance. Ferguson made her final appearance on Broadway in 1943 at the age of 60 that met with critical acclaim. Most recently, Diller has suffered serious medical problems which culminated in her being pronounced clinically dead for three minutes. Married four times, following her final marriage at age 51 she and her husband acquired a farm in Connecticut and divided their time between it and her Cap d'Antibes home on the Mediterranean Sea in the south of France.

Diller is a proud grandmother several times over. Despite her wealth and fame and glamorous lifestyle, Elsie Ferguson's personal life had more than its share of turmoil. She has several children from her marriage to her first husband, on whom "Fang" was based. Although her voice came across well enough, at age 47 she was well past her prime for fans who wanted to see her as the great youthful beauty she had once been. She was divorced twice and widowed once. In 1930 she made her first talkie that would also be her final film. Phyllis Diller has been married three times. In 1925 she made one film only before returning to the Broadway stage.

Diller's efforts have drawn numerous awards and acknowledgments from plastic surgeons and medical organizations. It is considered her best work in film. Diller has publicly discussed her plastic surgery, which changed her persona from being deliberately ugly to being chic and attractive for her age. One of these was the 1921 film entitled Forever in which she starred opposite the leading heartthrob of the day, Wallace Reid. She is an accomplished pianist as well as a painter. In 1921, she accepted another contract offer from Paramount Pictures to star in four films to be spread over a two-year period. Diller, a longtime resident of Brentwood, credits much of her success to the late Bob Hope, and keeps a framed portrait of Hope above her grand piano in the living room of her home. She fell in love with Paris and the French Riviera and within a few years bought a permanent home there.

In 1998, Diller parlayed her unique cackle into the vocals for "The Queen" in Disney/Pixar's animated move, A Bug's Life. In 1920, she traveled to the Middle East and Europe. Diller also starred in two short-lived television series: The Pruitts of Southampton on ABC in 1966 and the variety show The Beautiful Phyllis Diller Show on NBC in 1968. Elsie Ferguson eventually followed the move west and bought a home in the hills of Hollywood, California. Diller also appeared in more than a dozen, generally low-budget movies, including as herself in the children's animated cult classic from 1968, The Monster Mash, co-starring Boris Karloff. Many of the films she agreed to do were because they were adaptations of stage plays with which she was familiar. Diller's film appearances include a scene-stealing cameo appearance as a wisecracking lounge act emcee in the 1961 Hollywood production of Splendor in the Grass, starring Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty. Continuing to play roles of elegant society women, Ferguson was quickly dubbed "The Aristocrat of the Silent Screen." But the aristocratic label was also because she was known as a difficult and sometimes arrogant personality to work with.

Her main claim to fame is her stand-up comedy act. At the peak of her popularity, several film studios offered her a contract but she declined them all until the widely respected New York based French director Maurice Tourneur proposed she appear in the lead role as a sophisticated patrician in his 1917 silent film, "Barbary Sheep". Following this first film, Elsie Ferguson starred in two more films directed by Tourneur under a lucrative contract from Paramount Pictures that paid her $1,000 per day of filming. In her heydey, Diller achieved a record that still stands today in the Guinness Book of World Records for delivering 12 punchlines per minute, which is typical of her often outrageous, stacatto style of comedy. Ferguson, noted for her great beauty and as one of the "Park Avenue aristocrats," on one occasion is reputed to have sold $85,000.00 worth of bonds in less than an hour. It is here that Diller honed her act. During World War I, a number of Broadway stars organized a campaign to sell Liberty Bonds from the theatre stage prior to the performance as well as at highly publicized appearances at places such as the New York Public Library. Later in the decade, her career took off after selling out 87 straight weeks at San Francisco's legendary Purple Onion nightclub. In 1910 she spent time on the stage in London, England.

A housewife, mother and advertising copywriter, she first came to public attention as a contestant on Groucho Marx's quiz show You Bet Your Life in the mid-1950s. By 1909, she was a major Broadway star. Phyllis Diller (born July 17, 1917) is an American comedian who created the stage character of a wild-haired, oddly-dressed housewife who was ugly but didn't realize it, and who spent her time cackling and waving a long cigarette holder while making jokes about a husband named "Fang." She is generally considered one of the pioneers of female stand-up comedy. Raised and educated in Manhattan, she became interested in the theater at a young age and made her stage debut at seventeen as a chorus girl in a musical comedy. Born Elsie Louise Ferguson in New York City, she was the only child of a successful attorney. Elsie Ferguson, born August 19, 1883 - died November 15, 1961, was an American stage and film actress.