A multiple-sclerosis-stricken Richard Pryor cannot “bathe himself or prepare his own meals.” Richard Pryor So says court papers filed by the comic legend’s own son, who’s seeking to be put in charge of the Pryor estate.
Richard Pryor Jr., 38, launched the conservatorship fight last week in Los Angeles Superior Court, the New York Post says. Making a nasty family fight even nastier, the elder Pryor has gone to court himself … to obtain a restraining order against his son.
According to documents obtained by the paper, the younger Pryor says his 59-year-old dad (“Silver Streak”) is unable to care for himself, suffering from depression and heart disease — in addition to MS.
“He is currently being sequestered from his children by a former spouse,” the court action says. “Petitioner [Pryor Jr.] has not been able to visit or communicate with [his father] for almost three months.”
Jennifer Lee — Pryor wife No. 4 — is the “former spouse” in question. And she’s blasting the son. “It’s all fabrication,” Lee tells the Post. “Richard doesn’t need a conservator. He’s doing well.”
The conservatorship battle, Lee says, is “all about greed and money.”
The camp for the younger Pryor, meanwhile, says that’s just not so. A Pryor Jr. lawyer tells the Post: “This is about his father’s well-being.”
Pryor was diagnosed with MS in 1986.
SUNNY DAYS, CHASING THE CLOUDS AWAY: Katharine Hepburn, now 93 years young, is not only “OK,” she “occasionally ventures outside the house on warm days.” So says an extra-upbeat report from today’s New York Post. “Tell everyone I am doing fine,” the four-time Oscar-winner tells the paper. No word on what she does on cold days.
SHAFTED? Director John Singleton, he of the upcoming “Shaft” remake, is fighting for full custody of the 7-year-old daughter he had with a past flame, the New York Daily News reports. In court papers filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Singleton, 32, charges that the child’s mother often sends the girl out the door “without breakfast, in dirty clothes and unkempt hair.”
CASE CLOSED: The onetime girlfriend of Brandon Teena, the slain transgendered woman portrayed in the Oscar-nominated “Boys Don’t Cry,” has settled her invasion-of-privacy lawsuit with the studio behind the biopic, today’s Hollywood Reporter says. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
R.I.P.: John Colicos, who played baddie Count Baltar on TV’s “Battlestar Galactica” (1978-79), died Monday following a series of heart attacks. He was 71. …
… British actor Charles Gray, who tormented 007 in “Diamonds Are Forever” (1971) and narrated “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” (1975), died Tuesday in a London hospital. He was 71. …
… Veteran Hollywood producer/director Tommy Thompson died March 3 at the age of 72 of a heart attack suffered at the location shoot for Robert Altman’s upcoming “Dr. T and the Women.” …
