Richard Pryor Net Worth

Richard Pryor's Quotes

• 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.

Interesting Facts about Richard Pryor

1. 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.
2. In 1998, he won the first Mark Twain Prize for American Humor from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
3. 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 Zolang er mensen zijn (1959), Pryor and several other black soldiers beat and stabbed him, although not fatally.
4. Mother, Gertrude Thomas, passed away when Pryor was 27 years old.
5. Children: Renee Pryor, Richard Pryor Jr., Elizabeth Pryor, Rain Pryor, Stephen Pryor, Kelsey Pryor and Franklin Pryor (Mason Pryor).
6. Father, Buck Pryor (aka LeRoy Carter), was a bartender, boxer and World War II veteran, who passed away when Richard was age 28.
7. Claimed to have seen the film The Man in the Glass Booth (1975) 40 times. His future wife Jennifer Lee Pryor had a role in the film.
8. In 2002, Sheridan Road, on the south side of Peoria, was renamed Richard Pryor Place.
9. Pryor was originally slated to play Bart in Blazing Saddles (1974). Due to Pryor's background and controversial stand-up routines, Mel Brooks could not secure financing for the project. Brooks made Pryor a co-writer, and Cleavon Little played Bart.
10. He was originally considered for the role of Billy Ray Valentine in Trading Places (1983), before Eddie Murphy ultimately won the role.
11. Chosen as #1 in Comedy Central's 100 Greatest Stand-Ups of All Time. [April 2004]
12. Suffered from multiple sclerosis from 1986 until his death in 2005.
13. Former father-in-law Herbert Bonis managed Danny Kaye for 35 years.
14. Remarried two of his ex-wives: Flynn Belaine (1990) and Jennifer Lee Pryor (2001).
15. 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.
16. Eddie Murphy pointed to Pryor as his role model and inspiration to become a comedian himself.
17. In 1990, he suffered a massive heart attack and underwent triple bypass surgery.
18. One of his limousine drivers was Freddy Soto, who later became a stand-up comedian. He also passed away in 2005.
19. Had appeared in Superman III (1983), the only movie in the series in which Lex Luthor does not appear. However, he did eventually get to work with an on-screen Lex Luthor, by appearing in See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989) with Kevin Spacey.
20. He was considered for Eddie Murphy's roles in 48 Hrs. (1982), Trading Places (1983) and Beverly Hills Cop (1984).