Comedian and nightclub performer Sammy Petrillo, who built a career out of looking like and impersonating Jerry Lewis, died 22 August 2009. Born Sam Patrello (he changed the spelling of his name) on 4 October 1934 in the Bronx, New York, he first realized his resemblance to Lewis when he was a 15-year-old student in New York’s High School of Performing Arts. Later that same year, he found representation with an agent, and was cast in a sketch on The Colgate Comedy Hour, playing Jerry Lewis as a baby in a crib (with no lines).
Soon thereafter, he moved to Los Angeles, and teamed up with singer Duke Mitchell, who impersonated Dean Martin. The two put together a nightclub act impersonating the duo of Martin and Lewis. Building on that act, movie producer Jack Broder cast them in Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla (1952) with Lugosi.
Jerry Lewis’s son Gary told The New York Times “When Sammy and the other guy played in that gorilla movie, I remember my dad and Dean saying, ‘We got to sue these guys—this is no good.'” The younger Lewis, however, is unsure whether a suit was actually filed.
Petrillo and Broder’s nightclub act ended soon after Martin and Lewis broke up their own act, in 1956, but Petrillo continued touring nightclubs, and had several more film roles, including The Brain that Wouldn’t Die (1962). In his later year’s, he managed and performed at a Pittsburgh comedy club called the Nut House.
Petrillo is survived by his mother and a brother.