The pioneering Welsh wrestler Adrian Street, who found fame after leaving his mining community to become a flamboyant fighter, has died at the age of 82.
The Brynmawr-raised performer was known for his androgynous appearance and claimed to have taken part in more than 12,000 fights during a career that spanned seven decades – including one contest where he dropkicked Jimmy Savile.
Street left his home town in the 1950s to seek fame as a wrestler in London, rejecting his family’s tradition of working in coalmines. In the capital he became known for being a heel (bad guy), specialising in antagonising crowds with his fighting and appearance.
He later developed a penchant for flamboyant costumes that challenged social norms and helped sow the seeds for glam rock – often appearing wearing lipstick, with bright dyed hair and wearing a feather boa.
After a successful stint on the British wrestling scene he moved to Florida where he ran a wrestling academy, before moving back to the Welsh valleys towards the end of his life. He wrote a series of autobiographies, calling himself the “sadist in sequins” and “merchant of menace”.
His wife, Linda, a fellow wrestler, confirmed that Street died on 24 July in Cwmbran after recently undergoing brain surgery. She told the BBC her husband was “the kindest, most lovely and loving man I’ve ever known” and “the total opposite to how he behaved on stage”.
At one point Street in the 1970s was booked to wrestle Savile, decades before the TV presenter was exposed as one of Britain’s worst paedophiles. Street told the wrestling YouTube channel WSI that he was delighted with his performance against Savile.
He said: “I ripped his hair out of his head … I drop kicked him so hard he landed on his head. I beat the crap out of him. I kicked him and smashed him and stomped on him. I put a submission on him that nearly broke his back. They shovelled him out of the ring and that ended the contest and he never ever wrestled again.”
Street was the subject of the biopic You May Be Pretty, But I Am Beautiful, which premiered in 2019 with a screening close to his home town in Ebbw Vale.
Jeremy Deller, the Turner prize-winning artist, said he became fascinated with Street after seeing a black-and-white photograph of the wrestler posing with his coalminer father in the early 1970s.
Deller, who also made a film about Street’s life, said this “seemed to me possibly the most important photograph taken postwar”.
He added: “It encapsulates the whole history of Britain in that period – of our uneasy transition from being a centre of heavy industry to a producer of entertainment and services …
“He’s an incredible person, who has tremendous willpower and a great sense of his own worth. His story has an epic quality to it, he has basically reinvented himself for the late 20th century.”
