Joan Rivers (June 8, 1933 – September 4, 2014), was an American actress, comedian, writer, producer, and television host, best known for her stand-up comedy, for co-hosting the E! celebrity fashion show Fashion Police, and for starring in the reality series Joan & Melissa: Joan Knows Best alongside her daughter Melissa Rivers.

Born Joan Alexandra Rosenberg on June 8, 1933 in Brooklyn as the younger daughter of Russian-Jewish refugees, Rivers became interested in performing and at age 11 and once sent her photograph to MGM. She attended the Adelphi Academy preparatory school in Brooklyn. After graduation, she landed a role as a teenager in the crowd in the 1951 movie Mister Universe. She then attended Connecticut College for Women and, later, Barnard College, where she studied English and anthropology and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1954.

Upon graduating from college, Rivers found a job in the shoe department at Lord & Taylor and progressed to fashion coordinator of Bond clothing stores. But she later decided to pursue acting and appeared in a short-run play, Driftwood, playing a lesbian with a crush on a character played by a then-unknown Barbra Streisand.

She gained exposure in the 1960 USO show Broadway USA, and landed a gig with the Chicago-based improvisational acting troupe Second City, where she honed her now-familiar character of a neurotic Jewish woman. She returned to New York in 1962 and performed at such clubs as The Bitter End; started a comedy tour with Jim Connell and Jake Holmes; and signed a long-term, solo performance deal with a club called The Duplex. In 1965, she landed a gig as a gag writer/participant on CBS' Candid Camera and appeared for the first time on The Tonight Show, then hosted by Jack Paar. Later, she made appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and other talk/variety shows.

Her contemporaries when she was starting out included Woody Allen, George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Bill Cosby, Rodney Dangerfield and Dick Cavett. Rivers wrote and directed the 1978 feature comedy Rabbit Test, starring Billy Crystal as man who gets pregnant.

She voiced the baby in the John Travolta-Kirstie Alley box-office hit Look Who's Talking (1989) and was heard in Mel Brooks' Spaceballs (1987) as a character called Dot Matrix. She also appeared in such films as The Swimmer (1969), The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984), Serial Mom (1994), Goosed (1999) and Shrek 2 (2004) and on the TV series Suddenly Susan, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Simpsons and Hot in Cleveland.

For the stage, she co-wrote and starred in Joan Rivers: A Work in Progress by a Life in Progress at The Geffen Playhouse in Westwood. It later had successful runs in Edinburgh and London. And she released comedy albums, including the Grammy-nominated What Becomes a Semi-Legend Most? in 1997. The album reached No. 22 on the U.S. Billboard 200 and was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album.

In 1984, she penned The Life and Hard Times of Heidi Abromowitz, a New York Times best-seller based largely on her comic persona. Her other books included Men Are Stupid and They Like Big Boobs and Murder at the Academy Awards: A Red Carpet Murder Mystery.

By 2003, Rivers had left her E! red-carpet show for a three-year contract (valued at $6–8 million) to cover award shows' red carpet events for the TV Guide Channel. Rivers appeared in three episodes of the TV show Nip/Tuck during its second, third and seventh season, playing herself. Rivers appeared regularly on television's The Shopping Channel (in Canada) and QVC (in both the United States and the UK), promoting her own line of jewelry under brand name "The Joan Rivers Collection". She was also a guest speaker at the opening of the American Operating Room Nurses' 2000 San Francisco Conference. Both Joan and Melissa Rivers were frequent guests on Howard Stern's radio show, and Joan Rivers often appeared as a guest on UK panel show 8 Out of 10 Cats.

During her 55-year career as a comedian, Rivers' tough-talking style of satirical humor was both praised and criticized as being truthful, yet too personal, too gossipy, and very often abrasive. Nonetheless, with her ability to "tell it like it is," she became a pioneer of contemporary stand-up comedy. Commenting about her style, she told biographer Gerald Nachman, "Maybe I started it. We're a very gossipy culture. All we want to know now is private lives."

On September 4, 2014, River died at 81 from a complication resulting from her throat surgery on August 28th, 2014.