Leslie Townes Hope KBE, best known as Bob Hope, was a famous entertainer, having appeared in vaudeville, on Broadway, on radio and television, movies and in army concerts. Hope became famous with several Broadway musicals including Roberta, Say When, the 1936 Ziegfeld Follies and Red, Hot and Blue. Before becoming a comedian, Hope boxed professionally under the boxing nickname of Packy East.

Hope was born in Eltham, London, as fifth of seven sons. His English father, William Henry Hope, was a stonemason from Weston-super-Mare and his Welsh mother, Avis Townes, was a light opera singer. The family lived in Weston-super-Mare, Whitehall and St. George in Bristol before moving to Cleveland, Ohio in 1907. He became a United States citizen in 1908.

According to biographer Arthur Marx, Hope married his first wife, Grace Louise Troxell, his vaudeville partner since 1928, on January 25, 1933; they were quickly divorced. He married his second wife, reportedly on February 19, 1934, Dolores DeFina, a Bronx-born nightclub singer professionally known as Dolores Reade. They had met two months previously, at The Vogue, a Manhattan nightclub where Reade was performing. Dolores and Bob Hope had four children - all adopted from the same Evanston, Ill., orphanage - and remained together until his death.

In his 1938 film The Big Broadcast of 1938, he introduced the song that became his trademark: Thanks for the Memory, which he initially sang in a duet with Shirley Ross.

Hope starred in several one-reel comedies for Warner Bros. and from there his movie career accelerated quickly. As a movie star he was best known for the road movies in which he was paired with Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour, as well as the movie My Favorite Brunette. He never won any Oscars for these, though the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, honored him five times—with two honorary Oscars, two special awards and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. As host of the Academy Awards - a role he filled numerous times from the 1950s to the 1980s - he once joked about Oscar time, "Or as it's known at my house, Passover."

Hope's career in broadcasting spanned sixty-four years, and part of this was his long association with NBC. He first appeared on television in 1932, back when the tube was in the experimental stages, but it wasn't on the Peacock network--he appeared on a test transmission for CBS. By the time Hope made his radio debut in 1937, NBC was mainly just a radio network. Hope's first regular series for NBC Radio was the "Woodbury Soap Hour". One year later, he had the first show to bear his name, and then sponsored by Pepsodent toothpaste. Modern viewers remember Hope best for the many specials he did for the NBC television network in the decades that followed, some of which were sponsored by Texaco. Hope's Christmas specials were always fan favorites. A signature portion of his yuletide specials was his performance of "Silver Bells" (from his 1951 film The Lemon Drop Kid), usually done as a duet with a featured female guest star (through the years done with such stars as Olivia Newton-John and Brooke Shields). His final television special was in 1996, with guest Tony Danza helping Hope to salute the Presidents of the United States.

Hope lived so long that he suffered the rare indignity of receiving premature obituaries on two separate occasions. In 1998 his death was erroneously reported by Associated Press and then announced in the US House of Representatives. In 2003 he was among several famous figures who had pre-written obituaries published on CNN's web site due to a lapse in password protection.

Hope celebrated his 100th birthday on May 29, 2003, and might rival Irving Berlin or George Burns as the most notable entertainment centenarian. In honor of Hope on his birthday, the intersection of Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street in Los Angeles, California was christened Bob Hope Square. His centennial was declared Bob Hope Day in 35 U.S. states. Hope celebrated his birthday privately in his Toluca Lake home where he had lived since 1937. Even at 100 years of age, Hope maintained his sense of humor, quipping "I'm so old, they've canceled my blood type." And according to one of Hope's daughters, when asked on his deathbed where he wanted to be buried, he told his wife, "Surprise me." He died two months later of pneumonia at 9:28 PM July 27, 2003 at his home in Toluca Lake, north of Hollywood.