Comedian, actor and film-maker who rose to fame in partnership with Dean Martin

•Peter Bradshaw on Jerry Lewis: a knockabout clown with a dark and melancholy inner life

In 1946, a young comedian, Jerry Lewis, met a struggling singer, Dean Martin. They decided to form a team, Martin and Lewis, and the rest, as they say, is history. Their act, with its elaborate pattern of sparring and interruption, turned them into a success on the nightclub circuit – and on television, then establishing its hegemony over American popular entertainment.

Before long they were in Hollywood, under the sharp entrepreneurial aegis of the Paramount producer Hal Wallis. Between 1949 and 1956, they starred in more than a dozen movies, with Martin as the worldly philanderer and Lewis the gormless hanger-on. The humour may have been unsophisticated, but Wallis knew better than to skimp on the production values, and the duo became a box-office success.