Bob Hope was the ultimate comedian, a master of timing who turned the one-liner into an art form and became a national institution.
Jailed briefly as a teenager for stealing tennis balls, Hope rose through showbusiness ranks to become a close friend of a succession of presidents, including Kennedy, Nixon, Ford and Reagan and built up a personal fortune of at least $200 million.
He often joked that his greatest fear was being hijacked to a country "that never heard of me". His career, which included stints as a amateur boxer, minstrel and dancer, spanned seven decades, in which he starred in five mediums: vaudeville, radio, stage, movies and television.
An often vain man, who some said could never pass a mirror without taking a look, Hope never boasted it was talent that got him to where he was - as far as he was concerned, timing was everything. "The only thing I have is timing - and lots and lots of experience," he once said. "It's not a great talent."
With his trademark ski-slope nose, Hope was one of the first superstars and one of the 20th century's greatest comedians. He also pioneered with Bing Crosby of one of Hollywood's most enduring genres - the buddy movie.
Crosby and Hope became one of the screen's great couples in a succession of Road films beginning with 1939's Road to Singapore, which was originally a serious drama called The Road to Mandalay. It was turned into a comedy first for George Burns and Gracie Allen and then for Jack Oakie and Fred MacMurray, all of whom turned it down.
Crosby and Hope had appeared on each other's radio programs in which their writers had concocted a comical feud between the two. Crosby said the success of the Road pictures centred around the fact "that it seemed easier for our writers to write abusive dialogue than any other kind". Hope played the wiseguy who tried in vain to win the girl - usually Dorothy Lamour - from Crosby, who always seemed able to outsmart him.
Former Hope writer Larry Gelbart once said he "was aware that when vaudeville died, television was the box they put it in. Once he made the V in TV stand for 'variety'. He breathed life into it."
Hope had passably good looks and a singing voice that was no more than mediocre - but he was called the King of Stand-up Comedy and he could, with the help of a team of highly paid writers, pour out one-liners fast and with exquisite timing.
Close to 100 people wrote jokes for him, often more than a dozen at a time. Groucho Marx once complained that Hope was not a comic but a translator of what others wrote for him, according to writer John Lahr in a recent New Yorker magazine article.
In his office in his north Hollywood estate, he kept files containing literally millions of jokes - and he memorised thousands more. Topical one-liners were the basis of his art and he had been known to telephone his writers just before a performance to demand an instant joke on some new issue.
In his 80s, he said he still worked 200 days a year and expected to live to be 100 - "as long as I have a theatre booking". He would typically give more than 100 performances a year, across America and abroad.
The comedian never really adapted to the changing world. In the 1960s he was criticised by feminists angered by his girl jokes, a staple of his act.
Biographers and others who followed Hope's career have seen in him a driven man who craved the affection redolent in a laughing audience. He also had the reputation of being a womaniser with Lahr saying that Hope's wife of 66 years, Dolores, turning a blind eye to his affairs. Lahr quoted Delores Hope as telling him: "It never bothered me because I thought I was better-looking than anyone else."
The audiences he liked best were America's fighting men and women. In the second World War, Korea, Vietnam, right up to the 1991 Gulf war, Hope was there, always with his up-to-the-minute jokes and string of beautiful women.
His hair thinned and his jowls and wrinkles were testament to his non-stop lifestyle, but he remained upright and had a lift in his walk, thanks to the exercise he derived from being a fanatical golfer.
The Bob Hope Christmas Show, filmed while he was entertaining servicemen, was usually the highest-rated television special of the year during the Vietnam war.
Some saw Hope as a political right-winger. He once said he felt he had to openly take sides on major issues.He also said he had wanted to campaign for President Franklin Roosevelt, a Democrat, but the head of the toothpaste firm sponsoring his radio show had told him: "Republicans clean their teeth as well, you know."
He was a friend of presidents. Republican Richard Nixon attended the weddings of two of Hope's four adopted children and the comedian was a close friend of Republican Ronald Reagan, with whom he shared a Hollywood background.
Hope received 49 honorary degrees and more than 700 awards for humanitarian and professional efforts, including presidential medals of merit. In 1952 he received a Hollywood Oscar "for his contribution to the laughter of the world".
He was a devoted American, though he was born Leslie Townes Hope in Eltham, Kent, England, the fifth of seven sons of a stonemason. His father moved his family to Cleveland, Ohio, when he was three to work on a church there. He took up amateur boxing as a youth, fighting under the name Packy East, then switched to dancing. He worked as an assistant to an elder brother, a butcher, while earning $5 a night as a black-faced singing and dancing partner in a club.
After years of touring in stage acts, Hope became one of the stars of the Jerome Kern show Roberta in New York in 1933.
A friend took Hope to a nightclub where Dolores Reade was singing. She accepted his invitation to see his show. The following year they married.
Hope's big break came in 1938 when he was given his own radio show, The Bob Hope Show, which ran for 15 years, and his first starring role in a film, The Big Broadcast of 1938. In that film, he sang what was to become his theme song, Thanks for the Memory.