Comedian Jay Leno is looking for to turn into conservator over his wife Mavis Leno’s affairs as a result of she has dementia.
Leno filed court docket paperwork Friday to ask a household court docket choose to grant the conservatorship so he can construction a dwelling belief and different property plans to ensure that his 77-year-old wife has “managed assets sufficient to provide for her care” ought to he die earlier than her, based on a replica of the petition filed in Los Angeles Superior Court.
“Unfortunately, Mavis has been progressively losing capacity and orientation to space and time for several years,” the petition mentioned. “Jay is fully capable of continuing support for Mavis’s physical and financial needs, as he has throughout their marriage.”
The submitting mentioned that her “current condition renders her incapable of executing the estate plan.” The court docket paperwork mentioned she was being handled for “dementia and mood disorder.”
The couple has been married 43 years.
Leno, by way of a spokesperson, declined to touch upon Saturday.
Jay Leno on the set of the sport present “You Bet Your Life” in Pacoima in 2021.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
It was unclear when Mavis Leno was first recognized with the illness, however a health care provider’s report from November, filed as a part of the court docket proceedings, mentioned she suffered with impairments to her reminiscence, means to pay attention and use of motive.
The paperwork mentioned a conservatorship was wanted to permit Jay Leno to execute property plans, “which will provide for Mavis and Mavis’s brother [who is] her sole living heir aside from Jay.” Leno, who is 73, and Mavis Leno wouldn’t have youngsters. They stay in Beverly Hills.
“Jay Leno has always handled the couple’s finances through the term of their 43-year marriage, and will continue to do so until his passing,” the petition mentioned.
TMZ first reported the conservatorship petition.
When he was the favored host of “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” which ran on NBC for about 20 years, Jay Leno would regularly and lovingly point out Mavis.
Throughout their marriage, Mavis Leno independently pursued her personal progressive causes, together with preventing a proposed California poll proposition in opposition to affirmative motion within the mid-Nineties.
She was a board member of the Feminist Majority Foundation and chairwoman of its Campaign for Afghan Women and Girls to make sure that “the women and girls of Afghanistan are not forgotten,” based on the group’s web site. The basis’s marketing campaign for Afghan ladies was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.
Shortly after the Taliban got here to energy in Afghanistan, Mavis and Jay Leno donated $100,000 as seed cash for the Feminist Majority Foundation’s world ladies’s rights program.
Jay Leno at NBCUniversal’s Summer TCA Tour in Beverly Hills in 2015.
(Richard Shotwell / Invision / Associated Press)
“She is someone with a strong sense of purpose, compassion and curiosity,” writer Sue Smalley wrote a few decade in the past within the Los Angeles Times after interviewing Mavis Leno and her well-known husband. “She arrives first, on time [and] doesn’t need hair or makeup.”
The couple met at L.A.’s famed Comedy Store in 1976.
“I always had this idea that I would never get married,” she advised People journal in a 1987 interview. “But with Jay, I began to realize that this was the first time I was ever with someone where I had a perfect, calm sense of having arrived at my destination.”
Separately, she described assembly Leno in an interview with The Times.
“It was in January. … I believed, ‘Holy s–t! That comedian is gorgeous!” Mavis Leno recalled in a 2014 interview, saying friends had encouraged her to “ ‘hang out at the Comedy Store and the Improv — you’ll meet folks who may give you jobs.’ ”
“The first time I went, they sat us front row center. That means you’re this far from the comic. And there was Jay,” she mentioned.
Later that night, she went to the toilet, which was close to an space the place the comedians frolicked between their units.
“When I came out of the bathroom, he said, ‘Are you that girl in front?’ ” Mavis Leno recalled. “I said, ‘Yes, that was me.’ ”
Staff author Stacy Perman contributed to this report.
