West, Mae (17 Aug. 1893-22 Nov. 1980), stage and screen actress, was born Mary Jane West in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Matilda Delker Doelger, a corset and fashion model, and John Patrick West, a livery stable owner and heavyweight boxer. With the encouragement of her mother, she began an early show business career, winning an amateur night competition at the age of eight and acting in stock theatrical companies through her teens. As her comic and musical talents developed, she began appearing in musical reviews in New York, including A la Broadway (1911), Vera Violetta (1911), a Ziegfeld show entitled A Winsome Widow (1912), Sometime (1918), and The Mimic World of 1921 (1921). During this same period West traveled on the vaudeville circuit, teaming for a while with the Girard Brothers and later with pianist Harry Richman, in addition to performing in her own solo acts. Receiving praise for her timing, mimicry, and comic gifts, West displayed an early penchant for the outrageous, introducing to Broadway audiences the controversial shimmy dance, which she learned from black nightclub patrons in Chicago.

Having refined the basics of her comic technique and theatrical style in vaudeville, West was able to make the transition to the legitimate stage, partly because of her talents as a writer of her own material. Although there is some question about how much work was contributed by collaborators and although she had to defend her authorship claims in several court cases, West certainly created in her plays the character that would become her trademark and possessed the power necessary to have the plays produced. After writing three unproduced plays--The Ruby Ring (1921), The Hussy (1922), and Chick: An Unpublished Scandal (1924)--West gained notoriety for her 1926 production of Sex, the somewhat melodramatic story of a prostitute with a heart of gold. After a successful run of almost a year, the show was raided by the police, who arrested West on morals charges. She was fined and served a short jail sentence. West's second play, The Drag (1927), dealt with the subject of male homosexuality and included an elaborately staged drag queen ball.

West returned to the stage for a production of her satire of beauty contests, The Wicked Age (1927), but it was her creation of Diamond Lil (1928), the play as well as the prostitute character, that would transform her from headline news to the status of a legend. Set in the Bowery with a colorful cast of gangsters, white slavers, politicians, and mission workers, the play showcased West's wisecracking sexual personae and musical talents as dance hall entertainer. Her next play, Pleasure Man (1928), again brought notoriety to her as a writer when it was raided by the police and closed after several performances. A backstage story of an actor-rogue who seduces innocent women and abandons them, the play included another drag ball scene. While waiting for the trial, West toured with Diamond Lil, wrote another play (Frisco Kate, 1930), which later formed the kernel of the movie Klondike Annie, and wrote a novel entitled Babe Gordon, which was translated to the stage as The Constant Sinner for a brief run in 1931. Though legal delays prevented her from reopening Pleasure Man, West continued to cherish the hope that it would someday be produced; she published a novelization of the play in 1975.

West began her film career in 1932 when her friend George Raft helped her get a small role as a wisecracking dame in his picture Night after Night. Her critically successful, energetic performance in an otherwise mediocre film provided her the opportunity to adapt Diamond Lil to the movies as She Done Him Wrong (1933). Replete with sexual innuendo and risqué banter, the popular film made West one of the most powerful women in Hollywood, brought about moral outrage that led in part to the creation of the industry's self-censoring Production Code, and made costar Cary Grant a leading romantic comedy star. For the next ten years, West concentrated on her film career, following her initial success with I'm No Angel (1933, also with Grant), Belle of the Nineties (1934), Goin' to Town (1935), Klondike Annie (1936), Go West Young Man (1936), Every Day's a Holiday (1938, her first box office failure), My Little Chickadee (1940, which teamed her with W. C. Fields), and The Heat's On (1943).

Controversy continued to surround her as she battled to preserve the raunchy humor of each film while under the close scrutiny of the Hollywood censors. A personal scandal erupted in 1935 when a Works Progress Administration worker accidentally discovered a record of West's 1911 marriage to vaudevillian Frank Wallace, who subsequently sued for community property rights from his now-famous wife. At first denying her failed, youthful marriage, West eventually admitted the truth and divorced Wallace in 1942. She never remarried, thinking marriage to be inconsistent with her freewheeling sexual screen personae (although she spent the last twenty-five years of her life with one male companion, Paul Novak). During this time West continued to offend the moral majority; as a guest on the popular "Chase and Sanborn Hour" radio show, West participated in an Adam and Eve sketch with Don Ameche and was effectively banned from radio for many years.

West returned to the stage in 1944 with her play Catherine Was Great, about the Russian empress. She toured England and the United States with a popular revival of Diamond Lil from 1947 to 1951. From 1954 to 1959 she developed a musical comedy nightclub act that featured herself (then in her sixties) surrounded by young bodybuilders. In the 1960s and 1970s West was rediscovered by a younger audience who appreciated her sexual frankness as well as her battles against the moral establishment. She recorded several rock and roll albums and appeared as a parody of her legend in Myra Breckinridge (1970) and Sextette (1978).

Building from a rich entertainment background in vaudeville and theater, West created a unique and enduring character in Diamond Lil, a character as powerful in the popular imagination as Chaplin's Little Tramp. Using the comfortable distance of the Gay Nineties, West showed depression-era audiences a supremely confident woman who could take care of herself in any situation. With a wisecracking wit, West waged war against hypocrisy, pretension, elitism, and sexual repression in her plots. She spun optimistic fantasies of self-reliance, survival, and eventual success, her character's struggles at times paralleling her own personal triumphs as demonstrated throughout her autobiography, Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It (1959). Through costuming, theatricality, and double entendre, West parodied sexual allure and Hollywood romance. She offended conventional audiences with her open enjoyment of sexual freedom and her defiance of sexual double standards. According to critic Parker Tyler, West's "sudden greatness was to have introduced a deliberately comic parody of the sex goddess. Her unique blend of sexiness and vulgar comedy, in other words, was the screen's first sterling brand of conscious sex camp" (Sex Psyche Etcetera in the Film [1969], p. 20). This campy, exaggerated style of humor, along with her early championing of controversial sexual issues, made West extremely popular with gay audiences. Credited with composing the most American aphorisms since Benjamin Franklin, West remains one of the most quoted women in history. Her famous quips include "When I'm good, I'm very good, but when I'm bad, I'm better"; "I used to be Snow White but I drifted"; "It's not the men in my life, but the life in my men that count"; "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful"; "Come up and see me sometime"; "Peel me a grape." West died in Los Angeles.

West's extant play manuscripts are available for examination in the Library of Congress; many of her movie scripts exist in the University of Southern California Doheny Special Collections Library, the University of California at Los Angeles Theater Arts Library, and the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences. A revised and enlarged edition of Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It was published in 1970. A collection of her witticisms, The Wit and Wisdom of Mae West, was edited by Joseph Weintraub in 1967. George Eells and Stanley Musgrove, Mae West: A Biography (1982), is a good account of her life. A detailed survey of her artistic contributions is contained in Jon Tuska, The Films of Mae West (1973). See also Carol Ward's Mae West: A Bio-Bibliography (1989) for extensive primary and secondary bibliography as well as summaries and reprints of major interviews. An obituary is in the New York Times, 23 Nov. 1980.