David Johansen, the frontman and last surviving member of proto-punk band New York Dolls, who went on to become a lounge singer under the name Buster Poindexter and act in films such as “Scrooged,” has died. His daughter Leah Hennessey confirmed that he died Friday at home in New York. He was 75.

A statement released by the family Saturday said that Johansen’s death came “after a decade of profoundly compromised health” and that he “passed away peacefully at home, holding the hands of his wife Mara Hennessey and daughter Leah, in the sunlight surrounded by music and flowers.”

On Feb. 14, Johansen’s family announced he had been suffering from stage four cancer for the better part of a decade. He was additionally afflicted by a brain tumor, diagnosed in 2020, that prevented him from being able to perform for the final years of his life. The singer fell and broke his back this past November, rendering him bedridden, and leading to a fundraising effort through the Sweet Relief Foundation.

The family’s statement added, “David and his family were deeply moved by the outpouring of love and support they’ve experienced recently as the result of having gone public with their challenges. He was thankful that he had a chance to be in touch with so many friends and family before he passed. He knew he was ecstatically loved.” The family also said that “there will be several events celebrating David’s life and artistry; details to follow.”

Even as his health declined, Johansen had had a high profile in the last years of his life, thanks to a Showtime documentary co-directed by Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi. Johansen made public appearances to promote the doc alongside Scorsese when it came out in 2023. The film was based around the filming of what turned out to be Johansen’s final full gigs, at New York’s Cafe Carlyle right before the pandemic lockdown.

The Staten Island native started out singing with a local band, the Vagabond Missionaries, in the 1960s. He joined the nascent New York Dolls in 1971, and their first performance came at a Christmas Eve concert at a homeless shelter. Their first album, titled “New York Dolls” and produced by Todd Rundgren, was released in 1973 and featured the members in drag on the cover, reflecting the gender-bending style of the time of rockers like David Bowie.

The album’s grungy hard rock-meets-glam pop sound on songs like “Personality Crisis” reflected the theme of alienated youth and served as a template for bands like the Ramones. But though their albums were critically acclaimed, they didn’t sell well, and the Dolls became known as much for some members’ drug addiction and wild antics as for their musicianship.

But although Johansen admitted he bought into that perception of the group himself as the years passed and his musical interests changed, he came back around to giving his band its due. “When Morrissey got the Dolls together to do a (2004 reunion) concert in London at the Meltdown Festival,” he said in an MSNBC interview two years ago, “I was kind of hesitant, because over the years I had taken on the journalist (attitude) of ‘They were trashy, they were flashy, they were junkies,’ and that was about as far as I went with it. (Then) I started listening to the records to prepare for the show, and I was quite surprised how good they were. They were very musical — and pretty genius lyrics, if I do say so myself.”

The New York Dolls in 1972, including Jerry Nolan, standing left, Johnny Thunders, Killer Kane and Sylvain Sylvain. Seated: singer David Johansen. Getty Images

After releasing a second album, 1974’s “Too Much Too Soon,” the New York Dolls broke up in 1976. Johansen went on to perform and release albums as a solo act, often playing New York Dolls songs and performing with fellow Dolls member Sylvain Sylvain. Johansen opened for the Who on an East Coast tour in 1982.

He re-styled himself as lounge singer Buster Poindexter in the late 1980s, as part of a wave of jazzy sounds and retro performers. As Poindexter he performed with the “Saturday Night Live” band and had a hit with the song “Hot Hot Hot.”

Johansen also worked in film and television, playing the Ghost of Christmas Past in 1988’s “Scrooged” opposite Bill Murray. He co-starred in the movie “Car 54, Where Are You?” and appeared in films including “Let it Ride” and “Mr. Nanny.” He also had a part in the HBO series “Oz.”

The New York Dolls reunited in 2004 due to the undying fandom of Morrissey, who had been president of their regional fan club growing up and beseeched them to get back together when he was curating the Meltdown Festival. Johansen and Sylvain were joined at that show by Arthur Kane, who died shortly afterward; the other two members then went on to release three more albums and do multiple tours into the early 2010s.

For several years, Johansen hosted the eclectically programmed “David Johansen’s Mansion of Fun” on SiriusXM Radio. It was that satellite program that first grabbed the attention of Scorsese, who had liked the Dolls back in their early ’70s heyday.

“I became aware of his radio show, ‘Mansion of Fun,’” Scorsese said in an appearance on “Morning Joe.” “I didn’t know it was him curating it, I just would listen to this music and I’d hear different combinations, whether it was American folk, Sicilian folk, South American, Maria Callas singing Puccini or ‘La Boheme,’ all this stuff mixed together. And it became an inspiring foundation of my listening experience – and affected the films I made,” the director added.

In 2023, Scorsese and David Tedeschi directed “Personality Crisis: One Night Only,” a Showtime documentary. During a panel session held to promote the documentary, Johansen recounted his earliest memory of performing in front of an audience, as a youth at a Battle of the Bands event Staten Island. “I closed my eyes and I started singing ‘Oh baby, Boogaloo down Broadway’ and when I was done I thought, Why were they applauding,” he said. “It was a great moment. And I decided to make it my life’s work.”

Looking back on his career in a 2004 interview with Terry Gross for “Fresh Air,” Johansen reminisced on how casual beginnings turned into manifestos for the New York Dolls. “When we started the Dolls… we were really such a gang, and it was like us against the world, and we were really trying to evolve music into something new, and it was, you know, very kind of almost militant to us. And then over the years, you know, in the history books, like the ‘Rolling Stone Complete Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll’ or something, you look in the appendix and see where your name is and see what they say about you…. and (it) would always say, ‘They were trashy. They were flashy. They were drug addicts. They were drag queens.’ And that whole kind of trashy blah, blah, blah thing over the years kind of settled in my mind as, oh, yeah, that’s what it was, you know? And then by going back to it and deconstructing it, and then putting it back together again, I realized that, you know, it really is art.”

He added, “We just wanted to make an explosion of excitement. So that’s what was missing. Rock ‘n’ roll had become very kind of pedantic and meandering, and it was looking for something, but it was like an actor in search of a play or something, you know?”

Although in contemporary times it might be difficult to find many rock buffs disparaging the Dolls, the degree to which the band was polarizing at the time could be summed up just in how the group was famously voted both Best New Group and Worst New Group in a Creem magazine readers’ poll.

The group’s breakup was followed by a period in which Johansen released four solo studio albums between 1978-84, none of which charted any higher than No. 177 on the Billboard 200. But “Funky but Chic,” from his self-titled ’78 album, broke out on any number of FM stations, and in 1982, he impacted the mainstream rock airplay chart with an Animals medley, “We Gotta Get Out of This Place/Don’t Bring Me Down/It’s My Life,” off a live album. Still, playing the role of would-be rock star was clearly becoming less interesting for the singer.

Johansen’s Poindexter persona came about after he set up shop at Tramp’s in his Gramercy Park neighborhood in New York to do an undercover residency where he could cover the kind of eclectic material he favored beyond rock ‘n’ roll. “I figured I’d use a pseudonym so people wouldn’t be coming in screaming for ‘Funky But Chic’ (his post-Dolls solo single)… I had been listening to a lot of jump blues at the time, but I also did, ‘The Seven Deadly Virtues’ from ‘Camelot’ and whatever — just whatever songs I wanted to sing. And by the end of four weeks… it started out as a three-piece band and wound up as a 15-piece band. So I think by the time it got to the national awareness, it did have this kind of Vegas-y kind of idea to it. But it started off more kind of like the Louis Prima days in the ’50s of Vegas.”

The persona provided a kind of freedom for Johansen he hadn’t felt either as the Dolls’ frontman or performing under his own name.

“I have this friend, Elliott Murphy, who’s a singer…. When I started doing Buster Poindexter, he used to say to me, ‘David, Buster Poindexter is so much more like you than David Johansen is’, you know, if you get what I’m saying.’… In other words, with Buster, I really kind of went on stage and really didn’t edit myself and just kind of said whatever came to my mind and didn’t have many filters. Whereas prior to that… I had the David Johansen group or band or whatever it was called, and we used to open for a lot of bands in hockey rink. At that point, I was going out there and kind of presenting this what I thought was ideal picture of myself… whereas Buster was really kind of more warts and all, you know. And I think by doing that, it helped me to be myself more.”

“Hot Hot Hot” became nearly inescapable in 1987, with its No. 45 peak on the Billboard Hot 100 hardly reflecting how popular it became as an MTV staple. Johansen ultimately came to have mixed feelings, at best, about the tune. “That was, like, the bane of my existence, that song,” he said in the Scorsese film. “I don’t know how I feel about it now. I haven’t heard it lately. It was ubiquitous… they play it at weddings, bar mitzvahs, Six Flags.” Of how quickly that success came and went, he quipped, “I was a one-hit wonder twice.”

The New York Dolls had not played together for decades when Morrissey convinced the surviving members, who also included guitarist Sylvain Sylvain and bassist Arthur Kane, to reunite for a festival he was curating in the U.K. in 2004. “He called me, and he said, ‘I understand you’re a pretty big Maria Callas fan’,” Johansen said in the Scorsese documentary. “And I said, ‘Yes, I happen to be known for that in certain circles.’ He said, ‘Well, you know that film she made where she did a fantastic concert at the Royal Festival Hall?’ I said, ‘Yes, by heart.’ He said, ‘How would you like to play the Royal Festival Hall?… All you have to do is get the Dolls back together.’ And I thought, ‘Royal Festival Hall, Maria Callas…’ I combed every opium den in Chinatown, and I pulled that band together. We were fantastic.”

Any immediate plans to continue the reunion came to a halt when Kane fell ill and died just 22 days after the 2004 reunion gig, of previously undiagnosed leukemia. But after a pause, Johansen soldiered on with Sylvain in a reconstituted version of the group. The new version of the Dolls released three albums — 2006’s “One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This,” 2009’s “Cause I Sez So” (which reunited the with debut album producer Rundgren) and a swan song, 2011’s “Dancing Backward in High Heels.” The irony was not lost on many that the second incarnation of the group lasted much longer and had more recorded output than the first.

While the Dolls never announced a second breakup, the band went dormant again after a 2011 tour that included Earl Slick in the lineup and had the group opening for Motley Crue and Poison — ironically, two bands whose big, coiffed looks were influenced by the initially androgynous image of the Dolls.

Scorsese had some contact with Johansen before ultimately signing on to do a documentary about the singer. “We worked together on ‘Boardwalk Empire,’” the filmmaker recalled in 2023, and there was also an episode of the series “Vinyl” — edited by Tedeschi, who went on to co-direct the doc — that featured a dramatized portrayal of the Dolls recording “Personality Crisis.”

Later, Scorsese went to see one of Johansen’s shows at Club Carlyle, and “after it was over, we looked at each other and said, ‘We gotta shoot this thing’… We didn’t know it was going to be a film, but we wanted to record it.” He got Brian Grazer and Ron Howard on board as producers, and filmed shows at the New York nightspot around the time he was opening “The Irishman.” “Less than a few weeks later was the shutdown, and we had captured it just in time.”

Johansen told “Morning Joe” that the Cafe Carlyle shows represented the ultimate performing pleasure for him. “It’s a dream because you can sleep there,” he said of the hotel-adjacent shows. “My dream my whole life has been taking an elevator to work. I wish I could press a button and be in the dressing room. It’s the schlep that kills you.”

The singer also had other outlets for his varied musical tastes, including forming the band the Harry Smiths with Levon Helm and Hubert Sumlin, which performed the songs of Howlin’ Wolf. As a visual artist, he recently had an exhibition of his paintings in New York at the Elliot Templeton Fine Arts gallery. 

Leah Hennessey took her father’s struggles public last month with a candid post and plea for help, accompanied by photos of herself at his bedside.

“As some but not many of you know, David has been in intensive treatment for stage 4 cancer for most of the past decade,” she wrote. “Five years ago at the beginning of the pandemic we discovered that David’s cancer had progressed and he had a brain tumor. There have been complications ever since. He’s never made his diagnosis public, as he and my mother Mara are generally very private people, but we feel compelled to share this now, due to the increasingly severe financial burden our family is facing.” The post added that Johansen had fallen down the stairs and broken his back in two places on the day after Thanksgiving, and said that although a subsequent surgery had been successful, Johansen had been bedridden and required around-the-clock care, “as hilarious and wise as (he) continues to be.”

Hennessey directed supportive fans to the David Johansen Fund, set up through the Sweet Relief Foundation.

With Johansen’s death, there are no longer any surviving original members of the Dolls. Sylvain died in January 2021. The group’s very first drummer, Billy Murcia, died in 1972, before the band’s recording career got underway. His successor in the classic lineup of the group, Jerry Nolan, passed away in 1992. Guitarist Johnny Thunders died in 1991, and Kane passed away shortly after the 2004 reunion.

Talking at the time the Dolls were reuniting in the late 2000s, Johansen said: “It’s a tonic for the blues. People can walk around living a life of quiet desperation, but maybe if they started shouting about it, they’d be happy.”

Survivors include his wife, Mara Hennessey, and their daughter Leah.