Richard Pryor
(1940-2005)
American comic, actor
Legendary comic, actor, writer and hellraiser Richard Pryor has died at 65
The master comedian suffered a fatal heart attack at his San Fernando Valley home Saturday and died at a Los Angeles hospital, according to his wife Jennifer Pryor.
Pryor was struck with multiple sclerosis in the mid 1980s and was increasingly frail in his later years, although on rare occasions he returned to the stage of Los Angeles comedy clubs. His final performances were delivered from his wheelchair..
Pryor was the most controversial comic of his generation, picking up the jazz-influenced anti-establishment fury of the late Lenny Bruce while adding a wholly original racial element that outraged blacks and whites both ... except for the legions of high-schoolers, musicians, college students and fellow comedians who gathered around his amazing life-performance records, usually in a cloud of marijuana smoke.
His records were smash hits and his stand-up routines were the first to become concerts, in the rock band style.
Before Pryor, the only superstar black comic was the brilliant Bill Cosby. But Cosby was a low-key family-friendly -- and white-friendly -- performer. Pryor was exactly the negro most whites feared, with his ghetto background and bastard upbringing and burning anger.
His revolutionary style became the template for a thousand black standup comics. Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle ... all have praised Pryor as their king of comedy.
The winner of the Kennedy Center's first Mark Twain Award for American humor, Pryor was also a champion comedic writer. He wrote for television shows and specials including Lily Tomlin's "Lily," Redd Foxx's "Sanford & Son" and "The Flip Wilson Show." Pryor also wrote the comedy masterpiece "Blazing Saddles" with director Mel Brooks.
Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor was born Dec. 1, 1940, in Peoria, Ill. Much of his youth is murky or mired in contradictions. His parents were not married when he was born. Pryor variously claimed that his mother was a prostitute or worked as a bookkeeper in a brothel.
Pryor was largely raised by his grandmother, and as a preteen he was apparently molested -- the perpetrator later asked for an autograph, Pryor said. He dropped out of school at 14, but by then he was already entertaining friends with jokes and improvised skits.
He enlisted in the Army at 18 and participated in amateur shows in Germany. By 1960, he was back in Peoria, working in small clubs, modeling his act on Cosby and, to a lesser extent, Redd Foxx and Jerry Lewis. He made his way to New York in 1963 and had his major national break in 1966, when he appeared on the network shows On Broadway Tonight , Kraft Summer Music Hall and The Ed Sullivan Show.
Pryor wrote for The Flip Wilson Show in the 1960s, all the while polishing his stand-up act and pushing his humor toward the outer reaches of acceptable taste.
''Back between '65 and '68, I had a metamorphosis,'' he told The Post in 1978. ``I found out who I wanted to be. And who I wanted to be was the same guy who used to rap on the street corner back on North Washington Boulevard in Peoria.''
In his 1995 memoir, Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences, he wrote: ``There was a world of junkies and winos, pool hustlers and prostitutes, women and family screaming inside my head, trying to be heard.''
He invented a series of exaggerated characters, often brought to life with goggle-eyed mugging and liberal use of obscenities, including the n-word.
In addition to his comedy act, Pryor became a busy actor, appearing in more than 40 films between 1968 and 1991. In 1972, he was nominated for an Academy Award for his dramatic role as a musician in Lady Sings the Blues. He continued to write for others, including the TV series Sanford and Son, and won an Emmy Award in 1974 for his work in writing Lily , a comedy special for Lily Tomlin. That year, Pryor helped Mel Brooks with the script of Blazing Saddles .
BOX OFFICE HIT
By 1974, when he appeared in Uptown Saturday Night, Pryor had found a comic acting formula that would lead to a string of box office hits.
He seemed to take over the screen with outsized yet finely honed characters that were often elaborations of his stand-up personas.
In 1983, Pryor was given a five-year contract with Columbia Pictures for $40 million. But as his fame increased, so did his troubles. In the 1970s, he had been charged with failing to pay income taxes from 1967 to 1970, and he was convicted of marijuana possession.
He had a heart attack in 1978 and the same year was charged with firing a gun at his wife's car. Then came the freebasing episode in 1980, which Pryor later half-admitted was a suicide attempt.
In 1986, he made Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling , an autobiographical film about a comedian looking back on his life after nearly dying. A year later, after noticing physical weakness, Pryor received a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis.
He attempted a comeback as a stand-up comedian in 1992, but by then his failing health was evident.
Upon receiving the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain award in 1998, Pryor said, ``Like Mark Twain, I have been able to use humor to lessen people's hatred.''
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