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Comedian Richard Pryor dies at 65
Topic Started: Sunday Dec 11 2005, 12:18 PM (175 Views)
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AP: LOS ANGELES - Richard Pryor, the groundbreaking comedian whose profanely personal insights into race relations and modern life made him one of Hollywood’s biggest black stars, died of a heart attack Saturday. He was 65.

Pryor died shortly before 8 a.m. after being taken to a hospital from his home in the San Fernando Valley, said his business manager, Karen Finch. He had been ill for years with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative disease of the nervous system.

Music producer Quincy Jones described Pryor as a true pioneer of his art.
“He was the Charlie Parker of comedy, a master of telling the truth that influenced every comedian that came after him,” Jones said in a statement. “The legacy that he leaves will forever be with us.”

Pryor lived dangerously close to the edge both on stage and off.

He was regarded early in his career as one of the most foul-mouthed comics in the business, but he gained a wide following for his universal and frequently personal routines. After nearly losing his life in 1980 when he caught on fire while freebasing cocaine, he incorporated the ordeal into his later routines.

His audacious style influenced generations of stand-up artists, from Eddie Murphy and Chris Rock to Robin Williams and David Letterman, among others.

A series of hit comedies and concert films in the ’70s and ’80s helped make Pryor one of the highest paid stars in Hollywood, and he was one of the first black performers to have enough leverage to cut his own deals. In 1983, he signed a $40 million, five-year contract with Columbia Pictures.

His films included “Stir Crazy,” “Silver Streak,” “Which Way Is Up?” and “Richard Pryor Live on the Sunset Strip.”

Humor examined racism
Throughout his career, Pryor focused on racial inequality, once joking as the host of the Academy Awards in 1977 that Harry Belafonte and Sidney Poitier were the only black members of the Academy.

Pryor once marveled “that I live in racist America and I’m uneducated, yet a lot of people love me and like what I do, and I can make a living from it. You can’t do much better than that.”

But he battled drug and alcohol addictions for years, most notably when he suffered severe burns over 50 percent of his body while freebasing at his home. An admitted “junkie” at the time, Pryor spent six weeks recovering from the burns and much longer from his addictions.
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“I wish that every new and young comedian would understand what Richard was about and not confuse his genius with his language usage,” comedian Bill Cosby said through a spokesman Saturday.

In his later years, Pryor mellowed considerably, and his film roles looked more like easy paychecks than artistic endeavors. His robust work gave way to torpid efforts like “Harlem Nights,” “Brewster’s Millions” and “Hear No Evil, See No Evil.”

“I didn’t think ‘Brewster’s Millions’ was good to begin with,” Pryor once said. “I’m sorry, but they offered us the money. I was a pig, I got greedy.”

“I had some great things and I had some bad things. The best and the worst,” he said in 1995. “In other words, I had a life.”

Recognition came in 1998 from an unlikely source: The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington gave Pryor the first Mark Twain Prize for humor. He said in a statement that he was proud that, “like Mark Twain, I have been able to use humor to lessen people’s hatred.”
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