David Johansen, the swaggering, peacocking frontman with glam rock band New York Dolls, has died aged 75.

Last month he had announced he was living with cancer, and recently suffered a broken back. “David Johansen passed away peacefully at home, holding the hands of his wife Mara Hennessey and daughter Leah, in the sunlight surrounded by music and flowers,” reads a statement on a website created to raise funds for his medical care.

Strikingly handsome, he and his bandmates offset the macho rock star image by wearing women’s clothing and makeup, bringing a vaudevillian energy to their brutish music. As well as being straightforwardly thrilling, it proved to be hugely influential, pointing the way from glam to the punk music that was beginning to brew in New York City. They never broke the Top 100 of either the US or UK charts, but critics have deemed songs such as Personality Crisis – sung by Johansen with a throaty, lung-busting howl – some of the greatest rock of the 1970s.

Johansen was born and raised in Staten Island, and fronted local band the Vagabond Missionaries before he joined the nascent New York Dolls in 1971, and became the heart of an irreverent scene centred around Manhattan’s Mercer Art Center. They were signed to Mercury Records, who released their 1973 debut and the follow-up Too Much Too Soon the following year. The latter title felt prescient: the often debauched band broke up in 1975, with Johansen fronting a version that continued until 1976.

Johansen began a solo career, releasing his self-titled debut album in 1978, and released three more before taking on a new pseudonym: Buster Poindexter. This was as theatrical as his New York Dolls days but pointed in a very different direction, performing classic R&B, blues and pop as a tuxedoed crooner. He had a hit with his cover of Arrow’s holiday anthem Hot Hot Hot, and his self-titled 1987 debut took him to the US Top 40 for the first time. Three more Poindexter albums followed over the next decade.

In 2004, Morrissey induced the New York Dolls – Johansen, along with bandmates Sylvain Sylvain and Arthur Kane – to reform for the Meltdown festival he was curating. Kane died weeks later, but Johansen and Sylvain kept the band going, releasing three more studio albums and touring until 2011.

Johansen had an acting career, including opposite Bill Murray as the Ghost of Christmas Past in 1988’s Scrooged. He also worked as a radio host and was a painter. Among his admirers was Martin Scorsese, who co-directed the 2023 documentary Personality Crisis: One Night Only, centred on Johansen.

Johansen had been living with cancer for some time, with his stepdaughter Leah Hennessy explaining on his fundraising site in February: “David has been in intensive treatment for stage 4 cancer for most of the past decade. Five years ago at the beginning of the pandemic we discovered that David’s cancer had progressed and he had a brain tumor … To make matters worse, the day after Thanksgiving David fell down the stairs and broke his back in two places. ​After a week in the hospital and a successful surgery David has been bedridden and incapacitated.”

He is survived by Hennessey as well as his wife Mara, who he married in 2013. She was his third wife, after marriages to Cyrinda Foxe from 1977 to 1978 and Kate Simon from 1983 to 2011.