Jerry Lewis Collapses
The veteran funnyman, last seen (or, make that, hardly seen) on his annual Labor Day telethon, collapsed backstage Sunday during a charity show at London's historic Palladium theater, a producer of the event said.
Lewis, 76, was "resting comfortably" Monday at "his London residence," not a hospital, reps carefully pointed out.
On Sunday night, the comic legend was watching video clips of a past stage show when "I saw him collapse...out of the corner of my eye, producer Stephen Allen Green tells the Associated Press. "[H]e just sat back."
Lewis was treated in an ambulance behind the theater, according to BBC and AP reports.
"We are grateful it was not necessary for him to go to the hospital," Green and Tamsin Hollo, coproducer of High on Laughter, the anti-drug benefit at which Lewis was to receive an award, said in a statement.
It's not known what ailed Lewis. His wife SanDee, in fact, seems to say nothing did.
"He has not taken ill," Sandee Lewis tells the AP from the couple's base in Las Vegas. "There is no change in his condition."
A call to Jerry Lewis Films, also in Las Vegas, today seeking a comment was not returned.
Lewis, the onetime free-wheeling Nutty Professor, has endured numerous health setbacks of late.
Three years ago, it was viral meningitis. Last year, it was pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease he combats still with the help of steroids, a regimen that has puffed out his face and contributed to a 52-pound weight gain.
Also last year, Lewis had an electronic device attached to his spinal cord to help stop severe back pain he'd suffered from since the 1960s.
While the maladies have cut into the all-nighters Lewis used to pull on his Muscular Dystrophy Association telethon, they haven't dulled the show-biz drive for the man who first tore up the nightclub circuit in the 1940s and 1950s with Dean Martin.
"You got to kill me to stop me," Lewis said on CNN's Larry King Live last month. "There's no way I could stop."
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