He was born Richard Franklin Lennox Thomas Pryor III — no mean appellation for a boy who grew up in a brothel run by his parents and owned by his grandmother in Peoria, Illinois.

Young Richard learnt the facts of life by peering through keyholes. Yet for all that, he had a strict upbringing. He attended church and went to parochial school until the church authorities found out what his family did for a living, at which point he was abruptly transferred to the public education system. It was then that his trouble started. Pryor dropped gradually into a pattern of drugs, alcohol, violence and lawsuits that was to dog him through the next two and a half decades.

Despite his chaotic personal life, or perhaps because of it, Pryor’s talent bloomed rapidly. He had appeared in amateur comedy shows while serving with the US Army in Germany, and became a professional comic at a club in his home town of Peoria after his discharge.

But Peoria, the archetypal synonym for the more boring aspects of middle-America (despite the Pryor family’s thriving brothel) was hardly the entertainment capital of the world. Nor did it suit Pryor’s iconoclastic, raunchy style of comedy. In 1963, inspired by the success of the black comedian Bill Cosby, he took a chance and moved to New York.

He started out in the same “colourless” mould, once saying: “I made a lot of money being Bill Cosby.” But with his wild eyes and arched eyebrows dominating a face forever in motion, Pryor was never that safe. Television appearances began in 1966, though the nature of his material usually confined him to late-night shows, and he was soon hired to appear in Las Vegas for $3,000 a week. But as his success mounted, so did Pryor’s resentment at the restraints placed on his style by the white show business establishment. They wanted him, he said, to become “the kind of coloured guy we’d like to have over to our house”. It was not the style of an entertainer who once summed up his outlook on comedy by saying: “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 f*** off the stage, it’s that simple.”

As soon as his act no longer amused him, Pryor did just that. In 1969 he abandoned his Las Vegas routine halfway through, saying: “What the f*** am I doing here?” Pryor retreated to Hollywood. He appeared in a few minor roles while making some highly successful recordings of his comedy routines.

His live performances, which had become darker, bluer and even more searingly honest since Las Vegas, were packing concert halls across the country. He delivered surreal monologues in the argot of the drug culture, calling himself a “crazy nigger”. Critics hailed him as a major step forward in the evolution of a true black humour in the US.

He was now writing, too, gaining two Emmy awards for his work on Lily Tomlin television shows and collaborating with Mel Brooks on the 1974 film Blazing Saddles. For the latter he received the American Writers Guild Award and the American Academy of Humour Award. Although nervous studio bosses would not let him play the sheriff in the film, his collaboration on the screenplay with Gene Wilder laid the foundations for a lasting partnership. The on-screen double act was only postponed and Silver Streak (1976) was the first of four films in which they co-starred during the next 15 years.

The money was rolling in, Pryor’s film roles were getting bigger, and behind the scenes his private life was falling apart. There was a conviction for possession of marijuana, another for assaulting a motel desk clerk, and a running battle with the income tax authorities. He had a self-confessed addiction to cocaine — “like I bought Peru”, he said later — and failed marriage followed failed marriage. In 1978 he was charged with shooting at his estranged third wife. Fortunately, being stoned at the time, he only succeeded in hitting her Mercedes. “I killed her car,” he would joke.

On June 9, 1980, everything changed. Pryor accidentally set himself on fire, possibly while attempting to freebase cocaine, and was taken to hospital with severe burns over 50 per cent of his body. He lay on the critical list for several weeks, underwent several skin graft operations, and eventually emerged from hospital a reformed character. In his autobiography Pryor Convictions and Other Life Sentences (1995), he suggested that the freebasing story derived from an attempt by his managers to cover up what was really a suicide attempt. By his own later account, however, he had been taking cocaine for several days on end before drenching himself in brandy and setting it on fire — an unusual way in which to attempt suicide. It was often difficult to extract the facts of Pryor’s life from his stories, often blown out of proportion as comedy routines.

His talent was undiminished, though it now lacked the wild, angry magic of his earlier days. The release of Stir Crazy (1980) presented Pryor and Wilder as two hopelessly ill-prepared jailbirds, like an updated Laurel and Hardy. It was a major hit, and by 1982 Pryor was rated as America’s fifth top box-office star, ahead of Paul Newman and Harrison Ford, and the $4 million fee he received for playing the computer genius wooed by Robert Vaughn’s villain in Superman III set a record for a black actor. He was reunited with Wilder on See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989), in which Wilder was deaf and Pryor his blind buddy, and on Another You (1991), the weakest of their films, with Wilder as a former mental patient and Pryor a conman.

Now solid gold at the box office, Pryor’s bad days seemed to be over, but fate still had one trick up its sleeve for Pryor: in 1986, visiting the Mayo Clinic to check on some slight disorientation, he was told that he had multiple sclerosis.

As the disease progressed, Pryor became a virtual recluse in his Bel Air mansion. He stayed in his bedroom, a revolver always within reach. In 1990 he suffered a major heart attack but recovered, later moving to a smaller house in Beverly Hills. He had quadruple bypass surgery in 1991.

It seemed that his career was long over, but in August 1992, on a rare visit to the Comedy Store on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip, Pryor astonished his friends by going on stage and performing. Six months later he was back on the road, giving six live shows in ten nights. He was wan, frail and sometimes confused, but still recognisably Richard Pryor, and still determined to be funny.

In an interview given to The New York Times in February 1993, Pryor looked back on his past life: “I got friends who say, ‘Oh I don’t regret nothing’. But I can’t say that. I regret some of the things I’ve done. But one thing I’ve learned: when they’re done, they’re done.”

In 2001 he married for the final time. His latest wife was Jennifer Lee, to whom he had been married briefly in the early 1980s. It was the second time he had remarried an ex-wife. He is also survived by seven children, one of whom is the actress and comedienne Rain Pryor.

Richard Pryor, comedian, actor and scriptwriter, was born on December 1, 1940. He died of a heart attack on December 10, 2005, aged 65.