Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
Joan Rivers is dead at age of 81, reports NBC News.
The controversial comedian and "Fashion Police" co-host" was
rushed to Mount Sinai hospital in New York on Aug. 28 after she
stopped breathing during a surgery on her vocal chords at a clinic, TMZ first reported.
Rivers remained in hospital and was kept on life support as her condition fluctuation,
moving in and out of intensive care throughout the week.
Rivers was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1933, and graduated from Barnard College in 1954. She got her start in show business in the late 1950s appearing in off-Broadways plays and performing standup routines in comedy clubs in Greenwich Village in the 1960s.
Her first big break came in 1965, when she made her first appearance on "The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson." She landed her first syndicated talk show, "The Joan Rivers Show," which last one season, in 1968 and continued to shoot to fame with appearances on "The Tonight Show" and "
The Ed Sullivan Show." In the 1970s her star power continued to grow appearing on more variety shows, and 1978 she wrote and directed "Rabbit Test," starring Billy Crystal.
In 1987 she hosted the season-long "The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers," and in 1989 came back to daytime TV with "The Joan Rivers Show."
Rivers had accomplished an incredible amount in her life, but she is perhaps best known for her
presence on the red carpet. Joan and her daughter Melissa Rivers "revolutionized the red carpet from a runway -- with little celebrity-reporter interaction -- into its own brand of entertainment that, for many, was just as interesting as the awards ceremony that followed," according to Vanity Fair.
The duo reported on and somewhat terrorized celebrities on the red carpet asking
everyone "Who are you wearing?" from 1996 until around 2004. Rivers focused all of her take-no-prisoners judgements for celebrity fashion on her E! series "Fashion Police," which launched in 2002, and has
given the world segments called, "Starlet Or Streetwalker." Rivers was first married in
1955 to James Sanger, but had the marriage annulled six months later. River's then married Edgar Rosenberg in 1965, and together they welcomed a daughter, Melissa, in 1968.
Rosenberg committed suicide in 1987. In 1994, Joan and her daughter would later star as themselves in "
Tears and Laughter: The Joan and Melissa Rivers Story," which People magazine called "a "grotesque TV movie that depicts their falling out and eventual rapprochement after the suicide of husband and father Edgar Rosenberg."
