Phyllis Ada Driver (July 17, 1917 – August 20, 2012), better known as Phyllis Diller, was an American stand-up comedian, actress, singer, dancer, and voice artist, best known for her eccentric stage persona, her self-deprecating humor, her wild hair and clothes, and her exaggerated, cackling laugh.

Diller's voice acting roles included the Queen in A Bug's Life, Granny Neutron in The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, Thelma Griffin in Family Guy, and various characters on Robot Chicken.

Biography

Diller credited much of her success to a motivational book, The Magic of Believing (1948) by Claude M. Bristol, which gave her confidence at the start of her career.

Diller was married and divorced twice. She had six children from her marriage to her first husband, Sherwood Anderson Diller. Her first child was Peter (born September 1940; died 1998 of cancer). Her second child Sally, born in November 1944, has suffered from schizophrenia most of her life. Her third child (born 1945), a son, lived for only two weeks in an incubator. A daughter, Suzanne, was born in March, 1946, followed by another daughter Stephanie (born October 1948, died 2002 of a stroke) and a son Perry (born February 1950). She states, "we lost the second shortly after he was born...a blue baby who lived just two weeks in an incubator." Phyllis described the child as having a deformity of the hands and possibly being blind. She said he was given her father's name of Perry, a name that would later be given to their youngest child. Diller's second husband was actor Warde Donovan (born Warde Tatum), whom she married on October 7, 1965. She 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 have become final. Their marriage continued until she divorced Donovan in 1975.

Robert P. Hastings was her partner, from 1985 until his death on May 23, 1996.

"Fang," the husband that Diller frequently mentioned in her act, was entirely fictional and not based on either of her actual husbands.

She candidly discussed her plastic surgery, a series of procedures first undertaken when she was 55. In her 2005 autobiography, she wrote that she had undergone "fifteen different procedures." Her numerous surgeries were the subject of a 20/20 segment February 12, 1993.

Diller penned her autobiography in 2005, titled Like a Lampshade in a Whorehouse. A direct-to-DVD version of the project, complete with early live clips of Diller, and interviews with her showbiz colleagues including Don Rickles, among others, was released in December 2006.

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