People all over the world are mourning the passing of legendary comedian, actor and Curb Your Enthusiasm star Richard Lewis, and all the attention has renewed an interest in the comedian and his personal life. While he didn’t have any kids, he was married to his lovely wife Joyce Lapinsky, who he’s been married to for 20 years. So who was she?
The couple reportedly met in 1998 at an album release party former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr. Lapinsky worked in music publishing at the time and they dated for years until they got engaged in 2004. The married in 2005.
In a 2007 interview with the Observer, Lewis talked about their first meeting. “It triggered what she calls ‘the snake dance,’” he said. “I might as well have been a 9-year-old. I was putting on a show for this woman.” At the time they met, Lewis lived on the Sunset Strip in Hollywood in a house brimming with collectibles.
Lapinsky told him “I knew that, if I wound up being with you, I would have to have my own home.” She wasn’t kidding. The couple shared two houses, one in L.A. and a cabin in the mountains 80 miles away from the city. They divided their time between both.
The couple dated for seven years before Lewis decided that Lapinsky should meet his therapist. “It’s sad— [I] had no confidence in my ability to select a mate,” he said. When he started complaining to the therapist about something minor that he felt was holding him back from commitment, the therapist put him in his place.
“In a voice that was almost satanic — it was so dark and loud that it seemed to echo through the neighborhood — my therapist screamed at me, ‘This is as good as it gets!’” Lewis said. “It shook me to my core.” Lewis’ Curb co-star Susie Essman also commented on the couple’s relationship:
“Joyce has such a stabilizing effect on him,” Essman said. “Everybody is looking for that one person in life who will love you unconditionally, and he’s found that with her. And yet he’s still miserable.” Lapinsky was a producer on the 2014 biopic about Lewis’ domicile called House of a Lifetime: Richard Lewis, and she also worked as a program-development consultant for a nonprofit organization called Urban Farming.
Here she is in 2008 at the launch of the Urban Farming Food Chain:
Lewis is only survived by Lapinsky, as the couple did not have any children together.