Richard Pryor RIP

[Jay]

Richard Pryor died today aged 65 after suffering MS for over 20 years. Not everyone's favourite comedian but I loved him. RIP mate and thanks for all the giggles.

[jaylee33]

Tragic news, always made me smile, great stand~up & actor who'll be missed dearly, may he rest in peace

[Dizzydiver]

Originally Posted by Jay

Richard Pryor died today aged 65 after suffering MS for over 20 years. Not everyone's favourite comedian but I loved him. RIP mate and thanks for all the giggles.

Know what you mean. Sad. I thought he was a really funny guy too.

[Fiona]

When I saw the headline on MSN I couldn't believe he was 65

[Mr T.]

Aye, better in stand-up than in films, but a naturally funny and wickedly observant comic with a killer sense of timing. And he used to be stella in Saturday Night with the likes of Gene Wilder et al. I think Richard Pryor Live on Hollywood Strip (?) was one of the funniest stand-ups I ever saw.

He was good in California Suite too.

Eddie Murphy wouldn't have been around today if it wasn't for Pryor, and indeed, Murphy based his own stand-up show on that rendered by Pryor.

A sad loss indeed.

[Paul Oliver]

Yes, a fantastic comedian, just a pity about the drugs waisting such a talent.

[NotDeadYet]

He wasn't just a funny guy but he was also a great pioneer too. I was very shocked to see this, I've had the radio on to and from Dorothea today and there was no mention on any of the news reports I heard. Very sad.

[Mr T.]

Richard Pryor
(Filed: 12/12/2005)

Richard Pryor, the American actor and stand-up comedian who died on Saturday aged 65, was one of the funniest, and most foul-mouthed, men in the world.

Pryor's comedy - especially his live act - was based on observation and mimicry; like much great comedy it was, au fond, serious. An example of this seriousness was his changing relationship with the term "nigger". In the early part of his career this was his favourite word, edging out four-letter expletives by a short head.

Later, though, the soi-disant "crazy nigger" gave it up. The stand-up act during which Pryor recounts this Pauline conversion is preserved on record on Wanted and on film in Richard Pryor Live at Sunset Strip (1982).

It is in that film, and even more so in its precursor, Richard Pryor Live In Concert (1979), that Pryor's genius - which included an unsurpassed gift for anecdote and the invention of a vivid gallery of characters - can best be discerned. Pryor drew his material from ordinary black experience, as well as from his own life.

A committed substance abuser, Pryor had extended episodes of addiction to both alcohol and cocaine, experiences about which he was characteristically frank and funny. To alcohol he owed the sensation of "waking up in the car doing 90"; to cocaine he was indebted for waist-to-scalp burns, the legacy of a near-fatal accident while "freebasing" - inhaling purified cocaine over an open flame; to a combination of the two belonged the heart attack which provides Live at Sunset Strip with one of its most uproarious set-pieces.

He suffered another heart attack, this time necessitating an operation for a coronary by-pass, while on tour in Australia in 1991.

Richard Pryor was born on December 1 1940 in the ghetto at Peoria, Illinois, a byword for ordinary middle America: a common question in American showbusiness is "Will it play in Peoria?" Not that there was anything middle-American about the Pryors' Peoria. "We were very affluent," he said. "We had the biggest whorehouse in the neighbourhood. My grandmother was the madam."

By the age of seven young Richard was sitting in with a night-club band and meeting jazz greats such as Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong and Count Basie. He made his stage debut at the age of 12, in a community production of Rumpelstiltskin. He was a restless teenager, unhappy at school and working at odd jobs - helping a janitor, labouring, packaging beef at a meat plant, racking balls at his grandfather's pool hall and truck-driving for his father's small construction company.

Pryor saw service in the US Army from 1958 to 1960, the bulk of which time he spent in Germany. On his return to the USA he made his debut at Harold's Club in Peoria, and before long was working regularly as a master of ceremonies and comedian.

Pryor emulated his role model, the black comedian Bill Cosby, in 1963 by moving to New York. His act first took off at the Cafe Wha? in Greenwich Village. By 1966 he was performing regularly at Las Vegas; he had gained national exposure on several television shows, and had considerable success with recordings. Pryor's live act was always brilliant. It was made familiar to a wider audience after 1970, when Pryor started to tour concert-halls around the country after he "went crazy" and walked off stage at the Aladdin hotel. (Cocaine played a part in this as, by Pryor's own account, it was the period of his life in which "I snorted up Peru.") He was eventually to win five Grammys for comedy recordings in the years between 1974 and 1982.

Pryor also enjoyed considerable success as a scriptwriter. His work for the comedienne Lily Tomlin won him an Emmy award in 1974; he wrote for the series Sanford and Son, the transatlantic equivalent of Steptoe and Son, and co-scripted Blazing Saddles, the Mel Brooks film, with its celebrated depiction of the effect on cowboys' digestions of their baked-bean diet.

When it came to performing in front of the camera himself, however, Pryor's record was mixed. A potentially lucrative association with NBC television ended because of the network's inability to tolerate his torrential outpourings of bad language.

Pryor did not repine, though, and displayed a commendable ability to play the industry at its own game when he simultaneously signed multi-film contracts with Universal Studios - $2m and an office next to Telly Savalas - and with Warner Brothers; at the same time, NBC were still paying him not to work for them.

The films themselves did not live up to this bravura display of fiscal acuity. Although he gave a thoughtful perfomance in Paul Schraeder's Blue Collar (1978), an entertaining one in the lively Car Wash (1976) and an uproarious one, as a brilliant but felonious computer programmer, in Richard Lester's Superman III (1983), he appeared in more than his fair share of disasters. These included the soporific all-black version of The Wizard of Oz, The Wiz (1978), the lame remake Brewster's Millions (1985), and the notorious turkey Harlem Nights (1989).

Perhaps Pryor's best movies were those he made with Gene Wilder: Silver Streak (1976), Stir Crazy (1980) and See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1990). The two had similarly deranged styles, and improvised on-screen together to considerable effect, but the end product was often patchy, tending to leave the audience with the feeling that the films had been more fun to take part in than they were to watch.

In 1990 Pryor was diagnosed as suffering from multiple sclerosis. "I'm not letting it destroy my life," said Pryor. "I'll be bigger and better than ever."

Richard Pryor was married seven times, to five women; he had seven children.