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He said of himself that he was the son of a prostitute and a chimpanzee: the most foul-mouthed comedian that elevated Hollywood

Summer of 1980. Richard Pryor is in the middle of shooting the film Born loser. One day, blinded by coke and marijuana, he douses his body with rum and sets himself on fire. Like a human torch he runs down the street until the police take him to the hospital. In the waiting room, when the doctor asks for Mrs. Pryor, eight women get up at once.

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“Son of a prostitute and a chimpanzee”, as he liked to say, Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III (Peoria, Illinois, 1940) had a childhood worthy of a Sade character. At the age of six he was raped by a neighbor, at eight he caught his mother fornicating with a client, and at 10 he was sent to live in his grandmother’s brothel.

As a teenager, his aggressive temper got him kicked out of high school and the army. Fed up with everything, the young he took refuge in the darkness of movie theaters. But neither the films of his admired howard hawks they managed to silence the voices he heard inside his head: “A world of drug addicts, drunks and whores who scream non-stop.”

To vomit those voices, he became a monologue. It was the 1960s. He began acting in Las Vegas, but his corrosive humor caught on more in New York, where he shared the stage with Bob Dylan and Woody Allen.

However, until 1974 he did not find his match: the television program Saturday night Live, who multiplied his audience thanks to that spidic nigger who He dropped a “son of a bitch” in each sentence and he mocked the police, racism, drugs, or his own marital misery.

Pryor was married seven times, and all his marriages ended like a rosary at dawn; On one occasion, he came to shooting up his partner’s car.

Richard Pryor’s movies

Regarding his film career, the actor himself acknowledged that “I have done fantastic things and not so good things. Money has not been indifferent to me”. Not surprisingly, he signed a 40 million dollar contract with Columbia Pictures, and received four million for his intervention in Superman 3 (1983), a million more than Christopher Reeve.

Between 1967 and 1997 he appeared in about 30 feature films, as different from each other as The magician (1978), The Muppets movie (1979), harlem nights (1989) or Don’t yell at me, I don’t see you (1989), the latter together with his inseparable Gene Wilder.

devastated by a multiple sclerosis, said goodbye to the big screen with lost highway (David Lynch, 1997) in a wheelchair and spent his last years secluded in his Californian mansion, watching over and over again The silence of the lambs.

He died of a heart attack in 2005, leaving seven children orphans and disciples as outstanding as eddy murphy either Robin Williams. Despite everything, his best epitaph was pronounced by someone as sinister as Bill Cosby: “No one has drawn as fine a line between tragedy and comedy as Richard Pryor.”

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