Jerry Lewis –– comedian, actor and director –– dies at 91

Jerry Lewis, the manic, rubber-faced comedian who burst onto the post-World War II show-business scene with partner Dean Martin to form the hottest comedy team of their era before launching his own highly successful solo career a decade later, died Sunday. He was 91.

Lewis died of natural causes in Las Vegas with his family by his side, his publicist Candi Cazau told the Associated Press.

Lewis' reputation as a comedic filmmaker in America never matched his canonization in France, where he was hailed as a cinematic genius for his self-directed comedies of the 1960s.

Known nearly as much for his philanthropic work as for his comedy the last few decades of his life, Lewis was a Labor Day weekend fixture for 44 years as host of the annual Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon.

From 1966 to 2010, the telethons raised more than $1 billion for what Lewis referred to as "my kids."

At the Academy Awards ceremony in 2009, he received the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award for his fund-raising work on behalf of MDA _ the reason for which he always refused to say.

"The important thing is that I do it, not the why," he told The Times some years ago.

In May 2011, Lewis announced that the upcoming Labor Day telethon would be his last as host. But that August, the MDA unexpectedly said the 85-year-old comedian would not appear as host on the telethon and would no longer serve as its national MDA chairman, a position he had held since the 1950s.

"Jerry Lewis is a world-class humanitarian and we're forever grateful to him for his more than half century of generous service to MDA," MDA Chairman of the Board R. Rodney Howell said at the time

A spokeswoman for Lewis told The Times that