Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor
Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor (1940–2005) was a stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and director known for reaching a broad audience with his trenchant observations and storytelling style.
Born in Peoria, Illinois, he left school in eighth grade. He later enlisted in the Army (1958–1960) and served in West Germany, but he spent much of that time incarcerated. Pryor began his stand-up comedy career in the early 1960s at Harold’s Club in Peoria. In 1963, he moved to New York City and performed regularly in clubs in Harlem and Greenwich Village. Inspired by Bill Cosby, Pryor began as a middlebrow comic. He appeared frequently on television variety shows such as The Ed Sullivan Show, The Merv Griffin Show, and The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.
By 1968, Pryor had moved away from Cosby’s style and developed a provocative approach, incorporating profanity and difficult subjects. His stand-up performances were recorded on comedy albums, earning him five Grammy Awards. In the 1970s, Pryor wrote for television shows such as Sanford and Son, The Flip Wilson Show, and a 1973 Lily Tomlin special, for which he shared an Emmy Award. He also began to appear in movies, including Lady Sings the Blues (1972), Uptown Saturday Night (1974), Silver Streak (1976), Greased Lightning (1977), and Blue Collar (1978).
In 1975, Pryor was a guest host on the first season of Saturday Night Live (SNL), the first Black person in this role. His own variety show, The Richard Pryor Show, premiered on NBC in 1977, but was cancelled after only four episodes. During the making of the film Stir Crazy, Pryor set himself on fire while freebasing. He later turned the incident into material for his film Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip (1982). In 1983, Pryor signed a five-year contract with Columbia Pictures and started his own production company, Indigo Productions. The films that followed included Superman III (1983), Brewster’s Millions (1985), Moving (1988), and See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989).
His autobiography, Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences (written with Todd Gold), was published in 1995. Pryor won the Writers Guild of America Award in 1974 and received the first Kennedy Center Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 1998. He was posthumously awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2006.