Approaching the ring, his face painted and decorated with sequins, and dressed in a robe trimmed with feather boa, DayGlo trunks and platform boots, “Exotic” Adrian Street, who has died aged 82, was a professional wrestler who more than lived up to his nickname, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Although in the late 1940s, Gorgeous George’s dyed blond curls and exaggerated flamboyance had made him the biggest attraction in the early days of American television, Street’s persona was something different, melding ambiguous sexuality with clever distortions of traditional ring villainry delivered in a strong physical style. The WWE president and former wrestler Triple H (Paul Levesque), called Street a “genre-bending pioneer whose larger-than-life presence and ruthlessness between the ropes changed the wrestling world for ever”.
