Background and career
Mary Jane West (August 17, 1893 – November 22, 1980), known as Mae West, was an American actress, singer, comedian, screenwriter, and playwright. Recognized as a prominent sex symbol of her time, she was known for portraying sexually confident characters and for her use of double entendres, often delivering her lines in a distinctive contralto voice. With a career spanning more than seven decades, she was frequently associated with controversies over censorship and once stated, "I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it." West is listed as one of the top 25 female movie stars of all time in the American Film Institute's survey AFI's 100 Years...100 Stars. For her contribution to the motion picture industry, she received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
West began performing in vaudeville and on stage in New York before moving on to film in Los Angeles. By 1933, she was one of the largest box-office draws in the U.S. and, by 1935, she was also the highest paid woman and the second-highest paid person in the U.S. (after William Randolph Hearst). Censorship had increasingly made West's sexually suggestive humor difficult to sustain on screen. She was included in the "Box Office Poison" list published by the Independent Theatre Owners Association in 1938. Among her film credits include Night After Night (1932; her motion picture debut), She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel (both 1933), Belle of the Nineties (1934), Go West, Young Man (1936), My Little Chickadee (1940), The Heat's On (1943), and Myra Breckinridge (1970). As her movie career declined, she remained active by writing books and plays, performing in Las Vegas and London, and appearing on radio and television shows. In later years, West also released rock and roll records, including the studio albums Way Out West (1966) and Great Balls of Fire (1972). Her final film role was in the musical comedy Sextette (1978).
In August 1980, West tripped while getting out of bed, which contributed to her death three months later at age 87.
Mary Jane West was born on August 17, 1893, in either the Greenpoint or Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, before the consolidation of New York City. She was delivered at home by her aunt, a midwife.
How Mae West makes money
She was the eldest surviving child of Mathilde Delker (originally "Doelger" and later Americanized to "Delker" or "Dilker") West, a corset and fashion model, and John Patrick "Battlin' Jack" West, a former prizefighter who later worked as a "special policeman" and founded a private investigation agency. In June 1932, after signing a two-month contract with Paramount that provided her a weekly salary of $5,000 ($110,000 in 2023), West left New York by train for California.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (2022-11-13), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
