Comic Richard Pryor dies of heart attack

LOS ANGELES – Richard Pryor, whose blunt, blue and brilliant comedic confrontations confidently tackled what many stand-up comics before him deemed too shocking – and thus off-limits – to broach, died Saturday. He was 65. Pryor suffered a heart attack at his home in the San Fernando Valley section of Los Angeles early Saturday morning. He was pronounced dead at a nearby hospital.

The comedian’s tremendous body of work, a political movement in itself, was steeped in race, class and social commentary, and encompassed the stage, screen, records and television. He won five Grammys, an Emmy and was an Academy Award nominee for his role in “Lady Sings the Blues” in 1972.

At one point the highest paid black performer in the entertainment industry, the highly lauded but misfortune-dogged comedian inadvertently became a de facto role model – a lone wolf figure who many an up-and-coming comic, including Eddie Murphy, Chris Rock, Robin Williams and Richard Belzer, have paid due homage. Pryor alone kicked stand-up humor into a brand new realm.

“Richard Pryor is the groundbreaker,” comedian Keenan Ivory Wayans once said. “For most of us he was the inspiration to get into comedy and also showed us that you can be black and have a black voice and be successful.”

Pryor had a history both bizarre and grim: self-immolation (1980), heart attack (1990) and marathon drug and alcohol use (that he finally kicked in the 1990s). Yet Pryor somehow – oftentimes miraculously it seemed – continued steady on the prowl, even after being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1986, a disease that robbed him of his trademark physicality.

Verbally potent and physically eloquent, Pryor worked as an actor and writer as well as a stand-up comic throughout the ‘70s and into the ‘80s. He won Grammys for his socially irreverent concert albums “Bicentennial Nigger” and “That Nigger’s Crazy.” And in 1973 he walked away with a writing Emmy for a Lily Tomlin television special.

Pryor starred in major feature films – from “Lady Sings the Blues” and the semiautobiographical directing turn in “Jo Jo Dancer, Your Life Is Calling,” to the less memorable “The Toy” and “Superman III.” He also co-starred with comedian Gene Wilder in the highly popular buddy films “Silver Streak” and “Stir Crazy.”

But it was his concert films – particularly “Richard Pryor – Live in Concert” (1979) – that many critics consider to be his best work.

In later years, Pryor’s life was a blur of bad choices and reckless acts. Scarred by drugs, violence, quadruple bypass surgery, broken marriages and estranged children, Pryor, submerged in personal chaos, tried to take his own life.

The initial reports of June 9, 1980, were that the comedian accidentally set himself on fire while freebasing cocaine. Pryor finally revealed the truth in his autobiography “Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences” (Pantheon, 1995 and co-written with Todd Gold): “After freebasing without interruption for several days in a row, I wasn’t able to discern one from the next. … Imagining relief was nearby, I reached for the cognac bottle on the table in front of me and poured it all over me. Real natural. Methodical. … I picked up my lighter. … I was engulfed in flame. I was in a place that wasn’t heaven or earth. I must’ve gone into shock because I didn’t feel anything.”

The freebasing incident, like many of Pryor’s more dramatic mishaps, turned up as encore-worthy centerpieces of his stage routines. Among them, the much talked about New Year’s morning in 1978 when he repeatedly fired a .357 magnum revolver into his then-wife’s car. In incident after incident, the public repeatedly walked alongside him, standing in full view of the wreckage, marveling at how many lives this mercurial man appeared to have.

But Pryor was best known for his searing analysis about the state of race relations. He was honored by the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts with the first Mark Twain Prize for American humor. “I feel great about accepting this prize,” he wrote in his official response, his familiar edge glinting through, “I feel great to be honored on a par with a great white man – now that’s funny!”

The comedian was poignant in his remarks to a Washington Post reporter shortly after winning the honor. “I’m a pioneer. That’s my contribution. I broke barriers for black comics. I was being Richard Pryor; that was me on that stage. But I was on drugs at the time.”

Born in Peoria, Ill., in 1940, Pryor grew up in one of his grandmother Marie’s string of whorehouses that catered to various black entertainers and vaudeville performers. Pryor developed and honed his comedic skills at an early age as class clown, and later was tapped by mentor Juliette Whittaker, director of the Carver Community Center in Carver, Ill., as a “14-year-old genius.” She helped to develop his stage and dramatic skills.

A father by 14 and Army veteran by 17, Pryor had a wealth of material from which to draw.

Pryor worked the Midwestern “chitlin circuit” until the early 1960s when he took his show on the road to New York’s Greenwich Village, which was in the throes of sociopolitical transition.

“A tentative but innovative rapprochement had been established between white audiences and a select group of black comedians,” explains journalist and historian Mel Watkins in his book, “On the Real Side” (Simon & Schuster, 1994). “The transitional comics of the ‘50s (Timmie Rogers, Slappy White, and Nipsey Russell) had made inroads and in varying degrees Dick Gregory, Bill Cosby and Godfrey Cambridge all had bridged the racial impasse.”

At the time, many black comedians eschewed not only social commentary, but they also tended to mute any fury, or at the very least sanded the edges of the country’s racial realities. Pryor, however, dived head first into the deepest of uncharted waters. “African Americans were accepted as clowns and jesters,” wrote Watkins, “but were expected to avoid satire and social commentary – the comedy of ideas.”

Much of the entertainer’s bottomless font of searing observations – social, political, racial – was attributed to his own wrestling with personal demons: a dramatic push-me-pull-you relationship with success within a predominantly white industry and his own racial allegiance.

In his 30 years as a performer, Pryor recorded more than 20 albums, and appeared in more than 40 films, including “Wild in the Streets” (1968); “You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It or You’ll Lose that Beat” (1971); “Hit,” “The Mack” and “Uptown Saturday Night” (1974); “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings” and “Car Wash” (1976); “Greased Lightning” and “Which Way Is Up?” (1977); “Blue Collar” and “California Suite” (1978); “The Muppet Movie” (1979); “In God We Trust” and “Wholly Moses” (1980); “Bustin’ Loose” (1981); “Some Kind of Hero” and “Brewster’s Millions” (1985); “Critical Condition” (1987); “Moving” (1988); “See No Evil, Hear No Evil” and “Harlem Nights” (1989); and “Another You” (1991).

Pryor became the highest-paid black performer at the time in 1983 with his $4 million paycheck for “Superman III.”

Along with his Grammys, and Emmy, and the Oscar nod, his script for the comedy satire “Blazing Saddles,” written with Mel Brooks, won the American Writers Guild Award and the American Academy of Humor Award in 1974.

In those small oases of calm which periodically dotted his life, Pryor was ever-changing, reconsidering himself, his choices: A trip to Zimbabwe in 1980, for example, led him to excise his frequent use of the “N-word.” “There are no niggers here,” he wrote in his autobiography. “The people here, they still have their self-respect, their pride.”

Struggling with his own sense of pride in another realm, Pryor found himself slowed and increasingly incapacitated in later years as MS took hold. He traveled around on a motorized scooter and continued to write and perform throughout the ‘90s – one-nighters at the Comedy Store and an episode about MS on the CBS hospital drama “Chicago Hope” that he helped to write and co-starred in with his daughter Rain.

Even with the help and therapeutic sparring of ex-wife Jennifer Lee, the disease left the once physically inexhaustible and seemingly insurmountable Pryor immobilized and imprisoned.

Commenting on his battle with addiction, Pryor told the Washington Post in 1999, “The drugs didn’t make me funny. God made me funny. The drugs kept me up in my imagination. But I felt … pathetic afterward. … Drugs messed me up.”

Pryor, who married six times, also is survived by sons Steven and Richard and daughters Elizabeth and Renee.