Richard Pryor

Stand-up comedian and screen clown who turned his life into hilarious (and foul-mouthed) 'street poetry'

Richard Pryor sits on a bar stool in shirtsleeves and a bow tie, with a can of beer in his hand, his mouth running with a plethora of "mother-fuckin' " and other truckyard expressions: aroused to anger he becomes manic, on a laughing or crying jag, leaping about the set; but only momentarily will he stop looking surprised at the injustices meted out to him. Funky, funny and freewheeling, he brought a new meaning to no-holds-barred autobiography. He was, in the words of Newsweek, "the man who took the jackhammer profanity of the black underclass and turned it into a scathing, hilarious street poetry".

Such is Pryor in his night-club act. Pryor in movies is another matter. Arguably the most accomplished and most popular black actor between Sidney Poitier and Eddie Murphy, he never had the chances in films that they did. Incidentally, how many of them disliked each other! Cosby cannot abide Murphy and Pryor only had bad things to say about Cleavon Little, who had the role he should have had in Blazing Saddles (1974: which he helped to write) and Yaphet Kotto, who played one of his work-mates in Blue Collar (1978). But Murphy adored Pryor, whom he regarded as his idol and his inspiration; his tribute was the film in which they co-starred, Harlem Nights (1989), but it left much to be desired.

Such antagonism as exists may be explained by the fact that even during the Seventies and Eighties there remained too few good roles for even the most talented of black performers. Pryor made his first film in 1967, The Busy Body, but despite his eminence on the cabaret and concert circuit he was for a while only being wheeled into films to do a turn, streetwise and sassy: James B. Harris's Some Call It Loving (1973), as a pathetic drink/drug addict; Poitier's Uptown Saturday Night (1974), as an opportunistic private eye; John Badham's The Bingo Long Travelling All-Stars and Motor Kings (1976), as a baseball player planning to disguise himself as a Cuban or Red Indian in order to play in a white team; and Michael Schultz's Car Wash (1976), as an enthusiastic hot gospeller.

A couple of these were "black" movies, but Pryor moved over into mainstream cinema, and into screen stardom in his own right, in Arthur Hiller's Silver Streak (1976), erupting into the film halfway through and effortlessly taking it from Gene Wilder and Jill Clayburgh. He did not care for the script, he admitted, but "took the role for the same reason I did most of my other movies. Because nobody offered me anything else."

During this period of movie stardom, he was only really well employed once, in Paul Schrader's serious study of factory-workers and corrupt union practices, Blue Collar, but he was also effective in the title role of Sidney Lumet's The Wiz (1978). Some other excursions only exposed the pitfalls in the paths of successful black comic actors: in Herbert Ross's California Suite (1978) he and Cosby play doctors from Chicago, but they are required only to indulge in slapstick cut-ups; and in Michael Schultz's Greased Lightning (1977), in which Pryor plays (with dignity) Wendell Scott, the first black racing driver, those around him resort to the black stereotypes of the Stepin Fetchit era. Still, it looks like a masterpiece beside two comic biblicals, Wholly Moses (1980), a dire Dudley Moore vehicle in which Pryor is a Pharaoh, and Marty Feldman's In God We Tru$t, in which he's God.

Pryor might well have regarded both as among disasters which had littered his life, including six broken marriages. He claimed to have been brought up in his grandmother's brothel, but the truth seems to have been that he grew up in the middle of Peoria's red-light district. It was a traumatic childhood, and service in the army - revealing the extent of racism - was, in his own words, even worse. He left Peoria in the mid-Sixties with a troupe of female impersonators (though most of them were women) and later developed his night-club act.

That brought him national fame until he abandoned it because "I was turning into plastic". It also brought him television offers, but his experience in that medium was marked by rows over censorship . There was a party which ended with an assault charge after he took a gun to shoot up a friend's car, and a hideous accident, reputedly while freebasing on cocaine, when he found that he had burned over half of his body.

Pryor mellowed and, although Poitier's Stir Crazy (1980), again with Wilder, was his biggest success commercially, it was not on any critic's Ten Best lists. Two other films of this period do capture his immense comic talent: Oz Scott's Bustin' Loose (1981), as an ex-con helping Cicely Tyson shepherd some kids cross country, and Richard Lester's Superman III (1983), as an out-of-work dishwasher who hacks into computers and swindles his boss out of millions. Delving into new depths of deviousness, Pryor reveals himself to be in the great tradition of screen clowns. He could be eloquent with the inanimate, be it his brushlike moustache or a woollen cap; his voice could slide or soar over a goodish scale, querulous to thunderous; he could perform sight gags with delicacy and dexterity: and he could do all of these things at great speed.

His later films - The Toy (1982), Brewster's Millions (1985), See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989), Another You (1991) - found no friends among the critics, but many among paying audiences. The only one to do poor business was Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life is Calling (1986), and it went straight to video in Britain. He was not only the star, but producer, director and co-writer; it was highly autobiographical, but after an entertaining start it becomes ragged. It is a pity, for it was quite a life, even if he only felt happy when performing.

"It's the only thing that's never hurt me," he said. "I'll be all right as long as I can stay in show business. It's the one place I've been able to find dignity and fulfilment."

David Shipman

In 1986 Richard Pryor suffered a lack of co-ordination whilst he was filming the medical comedy Critical Condition, writes Spencer Leigh, and he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. With its numerous symptoms, Pryor referred to it as "a disease God had put together with bits from other diseases". After several self-inflicted complaints, this time he blamed God. To add to his problems, Pryor needed a quadruple bypass in 1991, sought rehab in 1993 and spend his later years in a wheelchair, being cared for by a mistreated ex-wife, Jennifer Lee, whom he remarried in 2001.

His final films are no testament to his greatness, and his last screen roles were cameos - in a gangster film, Mad Dog Time (1996), and an experimental David Lynch film, Lost Highway (1997). He desperately wanted to perform but his comeback appearances in 1992 and then, on a smaller scale, in 1995 were more embarrassing than funny. His humour was better served in the memoir Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences (1995), which was later expanded with a chapter by Jennifer Lee. His final appearance was at a tribute concert, I Ain't Dead Yet, Motherfucker! (2004), in which Whoopi Goldberg called him "the funniest man alive".

In Donald Bogle's 1973 history of black film actors, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies and Bucks, Pryor receives a passing mention for Lady Sings the Blues (1972), but within a couple of years he would be a role model, and Hollywood producers would realise that films starring black actors could make money. If Pryor had been more judicious about the work he did, he would have left a greater film legacy.

However, it is not even for his best acting roles (Silver Streak, Blue Collar) that he will be remembered but for his extraordinary comedy routines, several of which were made into feature films. Although he revered the Sixties comedian Lenny Bruce, he was much funnier, and an album such as Wanted: Richard Pryor Live in Concert (1979) contains as many social insights as swear-words. His boxed set of nine albums was called And It's Deep Too! (1992) and it is extraordinary to hear someone who is so honest about his personal life, whether it be his childhood, his drug abuse or his dealings with prostitutes.

Richard Pryor was the first comedian to bring "motherfuckers", "niggers", "bitches" and "pussies" into mainstream entertainment; he not only inspired many comedians, but his influence can be heard too in rap music. He was once asked to take part in a film set well into the future. "How can there be a part for me?" he asked. "White folks ain't planning for us to be here."

* David Shipman died 22 April 1996