Actress/comedian Phyllis Diller has died at the age of 95, her agent confirmed to NBC News on Monday. "She was a true pioneer," Fred Wostbrock said. "The first female stand-up comedian. She paved the way for everybody. She paved the way for Joan Rivers, Ellen DeGeneres, Chelsea Handler. Phyllis was the first of the first. The first female to play Vegas ... she was on Broadway, she made movies. She did it all." Her longtime manager, Milton Suchin, told The Associated press, "She died peacefully in her sleep with a smile on her face." According to E!, her son Perry found her. She is also survived by two daughters. Diller suffered a near-fatal heart attack in 1999. The cause of her death has not been released. Advertise | AdChoices She was a staple of nightclubs and television from the 1950s — when female comics were rare indeed — until her retirement in 2002. Diller built her stand-up act around the persona of the corner-cutting housewife ("I bury a lot of my ironing in the back yard") with bizarre looks, a wardrobe to match (by "Omar of Omaha") and a husband named "Fang." Wrote Time magazine in 1961: "Onstage comes something that, by its own description, looks like a sackful of doorknobs. With hair dyed by Alcoa, pipe-cleaner limbs and knees just missing one another when the feet are wide apart, this is not Princess Volupine. It is Phyllis Diller, the poor man's Auntie Mame, only successful female among the New Wave comedians and one of the few women funny and tough enough ...
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Paul Martin Davis meets Professor William Stevely, Principal of Robert Gordon University in 1999, with responsibility over 10000 students, who discusses his transition from academia to management and the changing place of higher education in Scotland.
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