The divisive comedian who starred in The Nutty Professor

In the postwar period, Jerry Lewis, who has died aged 91, was one of America’s most successful entertainers. For five consecutive years from 1952, Lewis and his onscreen partner, Dean Martin, were among the top ten money-making stars in the world, said Michael Burleigh in the Daily Mail. Then, following their acrimonious split, Lewis defied predictions by carving out a similarly successful solo career, with hit films such as The Nutty Professor (1963) and The Bellboy (1960). Yet his brand of comedy was always an acquired taste: for everyone who laughed at his goofball antics, nerdish persona and rubbery face, there were others who found them wearying in the extreme. The critic Milton Shulman once said he’d rather crawl ten miles through barbed wire than sit through another Jerry Lewis film. Yet even after America fell out of love with Lewis in the mid-1960s, he remained popular in France, where he was revered as an experimentalist and an artist. “Lewis’s face is the grimacing mirror of our vanities,” said the French film critic Pierre Murat.

Jerome Levitch was born in Newark, in 1926, the son of two vaudevillians who worked the summer resorts known as the “Borscht Belt”. They were often on the road, said The New York Times, and left their son in the care of various aunts – an experience that left him with lifelong insecurity, and a desperate need for attention. Eventually, he was allowed to join his parents on tour and, aged 16, dropped out of school to pursue his comedy career. In 1945, he met a singer from Ohio named Dean Martin, who was everything Lewis wanted to be – handsome, assured and cool. Finding themselves on the same bill at a New York nightclub, the pair created a double act, in which Martin played a worldly crooner whose performances were constantly interrupted by Lewis, as a clumsy, post-adolescent fool. It proved a huge success – and by 1949 they were being invited to Hollywood. A succession of hit films, including That’s My Boy (1951), The Stooge (1952) and The Caddy (1953), followed. When Lewis started insisting on taking creative control of the process, however, relations with Martin became strained; they split in 1956, and didn’t speak again for 20 years.

While Martin resumed his singing career, Lewis wrote, directed and starred in a series of films, the best of which was The Nutty Professor – a reworking of the Jekyll and Hyde story, in which he played a nerdy scientist and his alter ego, a preening, womanising singer named Buddy Love. It was seen as an attack on Martin, but Lewis denied this: more likely, it was about two sides of himself. Soon after, he experienced a rapid reversal in his fortunes, when his brand of slapstick began to seem infantile to an America that was embracing the counterculture. Yet in the late 1960s, he taught a film-making class at the University of Southern California, where his pupils included Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. In the 1970s, Lewis was most prominent as the host of an annual telethon in aid of muscular dystrophy, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. He hosted the event every year until 2010, raising $2.45bn for Jerry’s Kids – long after it had come to be seen as “wince-makingly schmaltzy” and patronising. In 1982, Martin Scorsese revived his career by casting him in a straight role, as a talk-show host kidnapped by an obsessive fan, in The King of Comedy. The film wasn’t universally admired, but Lewis’s performance was highly praised. Around the same time there was a flurry of interest in a film he’d made in 1972, The Day the Clown Cried, in which he played a circus clown in a Nazi death camp who entertains children as they’re led into the gas chamber. He was hugely embarrassed by the film: it has never been released, and only a handful of people have ever seen it. His last film came out in 2013. A complicated man, known for being badtempered and controlling, he was serially unfaithful to his first wife, Patti Palmer, with whom he had six sons, one of whom died of a drug overdose. He is survived by his second wife, Sandee Pitnick, with whom he had a daughter.