Joey Bishop

The self-styled "mouse" of the Rat Pack, comedian Joey Bishop became that august group's last surviving member with the death of Frank Sinatra in 1998. Bishop began in burlesque, rising quickly to "top banana", but got his first big break when he met Sinatra in 1952 and joined the singer for a series of club gigs at the Copacabana. The two remained friends for life, appearing with fellow Rat Packers Dean Martin, Peter Lawford and Sammy Davis Jr in the features "Ocean's Eleven" (1960) and "Sergeant's 3" (1962), as well as their Las Vegas shows. Bishop, whom Sinatra called the 'Speaker of the House', was one of the few who could razz 'Ol' Blue Eyes' and get away with it, announcing in one famous exchange to a crowd, "Mr Sinatra will now speak of some of the good things the Mafia has done."

Bishop was a regular on the TV quiz show "Keep Talking" from 1958 to 1960 and then starred for four seasons as late-night talk-show host Joey Barnes in his own sitcom, "The Joey Bishop Show" (NBC, 1961-64; CBS, 1964-65). That experience and his legendary ability to improvise helped him carve out a career as a real life talk-show host as well, working as a permanent guest host for Jack Paar in the 60s before going on to sub for Johnny Carson a record 207 times. In addition, he hosted his own ABC talk-show, also called "The Joey Bishop Show" (1967-69). Among his other movies, Bishop acted in "The Naked and the Dead" (1958), "The Delta Force" (1986), as a Jewish-American hostage, and made a cameo appearance in his son Larry's "Mad Dog Time" (1996). He made his Broadway debut in 1981, stepping into "Sugar Babies", a musical hit reliving the hurly-burly days of burlesque that had spawned his career.