LEGENDARY COMEDIENNE JOAN RIVERS AT 81 DIES A WEEK AFTER ROUTINE THROAT PROCEDURE

JOAN RIVERS

Legendary comedienne Joan Rivers died on Thursday — exactly a week after she was rushed to a Manhattan hospital when she stopped breathing during a routine throat procedure, her daughter said.

Rivers’ daughter, Melissa, had been keeping vigil by her mother’s bedside at Mount Sinai Hospital as her condition failed to improve since she went into cardiac arrest on Aug. 28 at Yorkville Endoscopy.

By 1965, she appeared on “The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson,” the beginning of her most important professional relationship, but one that ended in a bitter feud when Rivers began her own late-night talk show.

Rivers was born Joan Alexandra Molinsky on June 8, 1933, in Brooklyn, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants.

Rivers started off as a Broadway actress and quickly moved on to standup comedy to pay the bills, making her rounds of New York City comedy clubs.

Along the way, Rivers married twice, the second time in 1965 to Edgar Rosenberg, who committed suicide in 1987. That union produced daughter Melissa, Rivers’ prime-time TV partner. Rivers’ second career included stints with her daughter as well as shows and appearances on QVC, TV Guide Channel and “Celebrity Apprentice,” which she won in 2009.

She was also the author of 12 books, including one released this year, “Diary of a Mad Diva,” in which she wasted no time getting in her licks.

“This book be dedicated to Kanye West, because he’ll never f—in’ read it,” she wrote in the dedication.

A fan of Twitter, with more than 2 million followers, Rivers recently posted tweets about the deaths of Robin Williams and Lauren Bacall.

Rivers remained in the hot seat right up until the end. Last month, during a discussion about her new book, she stormed out of an interview with CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield, a walkout Rivers mocked days later during an appearance on David Letterman’s “Late Show.”

Earlier this month, she said Palestinians “deserve to be dead” when asked a question about the body count in the latest Mideast conflict.

Rivers had always said she had little patience for political correctness, and that she saw nothing wrong with trying to make people laugh. She said she couldn’t imagine doing anything else with her life.

“Somebody said, ‘You can make six dollars standing up in a club,’” she said last year, “and I said, ‘Here I go!’ It was better than typing all day.”

She was 81...