RICHARD PRYOR [born Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor Sr. was an American stand-up comedian and actor who died on this date (b: 1940. He reached a broad audience with his trenchant observations and storytelling style and is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential stand-up comedians of all time. Pryor won a Primetime Emmy Award and five Grammy Awards. He received the first Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 1998. He won the Writers Guild of America Award in 1974. He was listed at number one on Comedy Central’s list of all-time greatest stand-up comedians. In 2017, Rolling Stone ranked him first on its list of the 50 best stand-up comics of all time.

Pryor’s body of work includes the concert films and recordings: Richard Pryor: Live & Smokin’, That Nigger’s Crazy, …Is It Something I Said?  Bicentennial Nigger, Richard Pryor: Live in Concert, Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip, and Richard Pryor: Here and Now. As an actor, he starred mainly in comedies. His occasional roles in dramas included Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar. He also appeared in action films, like Superman III . He collaborated on many projects with actor Gene Wilder, including the films Silver Streak, Stir Crazy, and See No Evil, Hear No Evil.

Nine years after Pryor’s death, in 2014 the biographical book Becoming Richard Pryor by Scott Saul stated that Pryor “acknowledged his bisexuality” and in 2018, Quincy Jones and Pryor’s widow Jennifer Lee claimed that Pryor had had a sexual relationship with Marlon Brando, and that Pryor was open about his bisexuality with his friends. Pryor’s daughter Rain later disputed the claim, to which Lee stated that Rain was in denial about her father’s bisexuality. Lee later told TMZ, in explanation, that “it was the 70s! Drugs were still good… If you did enough cocaine, you’d fuck a radiator and send it flowers in the morning”. In his autobiography Pryor Convictions, Pryor talked about having a two-week relationship with Mitrasha, a trans woman, which he called “two weeks of being gay”. In his first special, Live & Smokin’, Pryor discusses performing fellatio, and in 1977, he said at a gay rights show at the Hollywood Bowl, “I have sucked a dick.”