Overview (5)

Mini Bio (1)

Spouse (7)

Trade Mark (3)



Foul language that has been compared to raw sewage mixed with social insight that has been compared to Mark Twain



Frequently worked with Gene Wilder

His distinctive heavy mustache



Trivia (45)

Has admitted the fire that nearly killed him while free-basing cocaine in the early 1980s was in fact a suicide attempt. His management created the "accident" lie for the press in hopes of protecting him.



In 1998, he won the first Mark Twain Prize for American Humor from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.





He served in the United States Army from 1958 to 1960, but spent virtually the entire stint in an army prison. According to a 1999 profile about Pryor in The New Yorker, Pryor was incarcerated for an incident that occurred while he was stationed in West Germany. Angered that a white soldier was overly amused at the racially charged scenes of Solange es Menschen gibt (1959), Pryor and several other black soldiers beat and stabbed him, although not fatally.

Mother, Gertrude Thomas, passed away when Pryor was 27 years old.





Children: Renee Pryor, Richard Pryor Jr., Elizabeth Pryor, Rain Pryor , Stephen Pryor, Kelsey Pryor and Franklin Pryor ( Mason Pryor ).

Father, Buck Pryor (aka LeRoy Carter), was a bartender, boxer and World War II veteran, who passed away when Richard was age 28.



In 2002, Sheridan Road, on the south side of Peoria, was renamed Richard Pryor Place.





He was originally considered for the role of Billy Ray Valentine in Die Glücksritter (1983), before Eddie Murphy ultimately won the role.

Chosen as #1 in Comedy Central's 100 Greatest Stand-Ups of All Time. [April 2004]



Suffered from multiple sclerosis from 1986 until his death in 2005.





Though he made four films with Gene Wilder , the two comic actors were never as close as many thought, according to the Gene Wilder's autobiography.



Eddie Murphy pointed to Pryor as his role model and inspiration to become a comedian himself.

In 1990, he suffered a massive heart attack and underwent triple bypass surgery.





One of his limousine drivers was Freddy Soto , who later became a stand-up comedian. He also passed away in 2005.

Suffered a mild heart attack in November 1977. He passed away only nine days after his 65th birthday.



At age 16, he was expelled from Central High School for punching his science teacher.



He was expelled from a Catholic grammar school in Peoria, Illinois, when the nuns found out his grandmother owned a string of brothels.





He was invited to a private screening of Ich glaub', mich tritt ein Pferd (1978) by director John Landis , who wanted Pryor's opinion about the scene at the black roadhouse. Landis and the film's backers were concerned that it would be offensive to black audiences. Pryor laughed out loud, and told them that it should definitely be kept in the movie.



He is a second cousin, once removed, of rapper and actor Ludacris . Richard's maternal great-grandparents, William A. Craig and Nancy, were also Ludacris's maternal great-great-grandparents.

He was awarded a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6438 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California on May 20, 1993.





He was briefly attached to star in Malcolm X (1992) during the early production stages.



He was scheduled to appear on Die Muppet Show: Chris Langham (1981) until his notorious freebasing suicide attempt made that appointment impossible. Staff writer Chris Langham had to substitute.



He was the first black person to host Saturday Night Live (1975).

In a 2005 British poll to find "The Comedian's Comedian", Pryor was voted the 10th-greatest comedy act ever by fellow comedians and comedy insiders.





In 2018, Quincy Jones and Jennifer Lee Pryor claimed that Pryor 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. In his autobiography, Pryor admitted to having a two-week sexual relationship with a transvestite, which he called "two weeks of being gay".



He hated Uncle Tom's Fairy Tales (1969), a short film he appeared in when he was starting his stand-up career, so much he destroyed as much as he could of the original negatives.



He was going to star in Bird (1988) when the project was at Paramount Pictures.

Posthumously inducted into the International Mustache Hall of Fame in the category Film & Television (2017).



Labelled the 'black Lenny Bruce' he developed his act in night clubs and from 1966 became a star on tv, records and at Las Vegas.





He has appeared in one film that has been selected for the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant: Muppet Movie (1979). He has also written one film that is in registry: Der wilde wilde Westen (1974).

Personal Quotes (15)

You can have a film and have 200 white people working on it, and nobody finds anything wrong with that. But if you insist on having a black crew, all of a sudden there's something wrong.



[on his job as a boxing gym sparring partner]: I always had to fight the guys who looked like they just killed their parents.



Comedy rules! Don't let anybody tell you otherwise, and there are no rules in stand-up comedy, which I really like. You can do anything you want and you can say anything that comes to mind, just so long as it's funny. If you ain't funny then get the fuck off the stage, it's that simple.



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.



I had some great things and I had some bad things. The best and the worst. In other words, I had a life.



It's been a struggle for me because I had a chance to be white and refused.



Everyone carries around his own monsters.



[on the free-basing incident which set him on fire] When you are running down the street.... and you are on fire, people will get out of your way.



I met the President. We in trouble.





[At the 1977 Academy Awards] I'm here to explain why black people will never be nominated for anything. This show is going out to seventy-five million people - none of them black. We don't even know how to vote. There's 3,349 people in the voting thing and only two black people - Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte . We're quitting. You'll have to listen to Lawrence Welk



[on experiencing racism] I was just on the Today (1952) show and they were telling me how wonderful I was and I walk out into the reality of America and I can't get a cab.

The great comics all have a hole in their chest where their heart should be. Somebody yanked their heart out when they were just kids, and they've been spending their whole lives trying to fill that hole. Or kill the pain. I know that I did.



Black people got to look at themselves honestly, the same as white people did. And the stuff I talked about helped them do that. They loved it. Probably some sort of relief to both races that they could finally be honest about their shit.



[During his tour of Kenya in 1979, Pryor sat in a in a hotel lobby] The only people you saw were black. At the hotel, on television, in stores, on the street, in the newspapers, at restaurants, running the government, on advertisements. Everywhere...You know what? There are no niggers here. ... The people here, they still have their self-respect, their pride. [Describing legacy of trip that made him regret "ever having uttered the word 'nigger' on a stage or off it."]



[observation, 1967] I never thought about not making it. But the 'it' had nothing to do with show business. The 'it' I'm trying to make is me.



Salary (3)