Joan Rivers was born in Brooklyn, to immigrant Russian Jews, grew up in suburban New York and educated at Connecticut College and Barnard College, Manhattan.

She started comedy in the Fifties, and spent a decade ‘enduring humiliation and privation playing tawdry clubs, Borscht Belt hotels, and Greenwich Village cabarets’.

But her persistence paid off, and in 1965 got her first TV break when she appeared on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.

Within three years she was given her own daytime talk show – That Show With Joan Rivers – and by the Eighties she was the permanent guest host on the Tonight Show whenever Carson was away.

In 1986 she had an ill-fated six-part chat show for the BBC, taking its title from her 'Can we talk?' catchphrase, a registered trademark in the US. Today the show is mainly remembered for Peter Cook being wasted as her sidekick.

That same year, she was given her own late-night chat show on the new Fox network – but Carson was so upset by what he saw as her betrayal after a 20-year friendship that he banned her from his show forever. The two never reconciled before Carson’s death 2005.

That was followed by another self-titled daytime talk show, which ran from 1989 until 1994, and won her an Emmy award.

In 1987, she suffered personal tragedy when her husband Edgar Rosenberg, a British TV producer, killed himself, devastating Rivers, who developed bulimia and contemplated her own suicide. But she eventually turned the tragedy into typically uncompromising and uncomfortable comedy

She took a diversion from comedy in 1990, launching her own line of jewellery for the QVC home shopping channel. It was widely seen as a tacky move, but it was certainly a lucrative one – achieving more than $500million of sales.

Rivers is also known for her bitchy commentaries about celebrity fashions on the red carpet before glitzy showbiz events. She worked with her daughter Melissa for the E! channel from 1996 to 2004, then moving to the TV Guide channel for two years. In Shrek 2, she cameoed as an animated version of herself, parodying this role.

Rivers is an unashamed advocate of plastic surgery, which became a staple of her self-deprecating stand-up, and led to two guest appearances in the cosmetic surgery drama Nip/Tuck.

In 2002, she brought a one-woman show Broke And Alone to the Edinburgh Fringe, which then transferred to the West End.

In August 2007, Rivers began workshopping her autobiographical play, A Work In Progress By A Life In Progress, which opened at the Geffin Playhouse in Los Angeles in February 2008 to mixed reviews, before transferring to the 2008 Edinburgh Festival, then on to the West End and Broadway.