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”.
Street’s influence extended beyond the wrestling world. The glam-rocker Marc Bolan admitted to modelling himself on Street. The Turner prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller, whose installation So Many Ways to Hurt You (The Life and Times of Adrian Street) appeared at the 2010 São Paulo biennial, was drawn to a 1973 photo of Street’s return, as European middleweight champion, to the Blaina colliery, where he caught his father, Emrys, coming up from the pits where he had worked for 50 years. Deller called Street “symbolic of the [journey] Britain took at the time … from a country that relied on industry, to one that has since relied on entertainment and services … he was a trailblazer”. It was also “a revenge photograph …going back to the pit, where he’d been bullied, teased and laughed at, to show his father and the guys in the pit what he’d made of himself and how proud he was of how he looked”.
Street was born in Brynmawr, in the south Wales valleys, the second of three children of Nora (nee Foster) and Emrys, a coalminer (and son of a coalminer) who was on wartime service, on the way to Singapore, at the time of Adrian’s birth. Adrian did not meet his father until after Emry’s release from a Japanese prison camp in 1945. Their relationship was antagonistic; at 15 Adrian was taken out of school and sent down the mines, which he described as too dark for someone who “sought the spotlight”.
He left home at 16 and moved to London. A keen bodybuilder, he sold pictures to bodybuilding magazines and worked at fairground boxing for £1 a fight. He was trained by Chic Osmond and Mike Demitre. The American wrestlers he admired were Lou Thesz, Buddy Rogers and Don Leo Jonathan. Billed as Kid Tarzan Jonathan, Street made his pro debut in a main event at the New Addington hotel, Croydon, against Gentleman Geoff Moran. As Street told it, he dislocated Moran’s shoulder in under two minutes, infuriating both Moran and the promoter.
As Adrian Street he first wrestled with a teddy-boy quiff, then bleached it and called himself “Nature Boy” in homage to Rogers. He appeared on ITV’s World of Sport, and was successful in tag teams: “The Welsh Wizards” with Tony Charles, and “Hell’s Angels” with “Bad Boy” Bobby Barnes. He played the “heel” (bad guy) brilliantly; kissing his opponent to escape a dangerous situation, then covering him with makeup when he had put him down with a dastardly manoeuvre. After one tag match against “Mr TV” Jackie Pallo and Jackie Jr, Pallo explained how disgusting he found Street’s kisses: “Junior doesn’t mind them, though.”
By 1970 when he went to All-Star Wrestling and won their middleweight title numerous times, he was fully Exotic Adrian, to the point where the TV celebrity Jimmy Savile, who had wrestled from the 50s onwards, was aping parts of his act. Years later, after Savile’s child abuse was revealed, Street attracted attention for recalling a 1971 match in Nottingham. He had injured the champion George Kidd in a match, and while awaiting their title rematch, he was asked to wrestle Savile and carry him to a draw to please the large crowd expected. Insulted by the suggestion, and already disliking Savile, he physically punished the disc jockey, even tearing out his hair while holding him upside down. Years later Street said if he had known Savile’s true nature, he would have hurt him much more.
Meanwhile, he had a role in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1972 film The Canterbury Tales; he would also appear in the caveman epic Quest for Fire (1981) and Grunt! The Wrestling Movie (1985).
In 1969 Street met Linda Gunthorpe Hawker while buying goldfish in a pet shop. He invited her to watch a match and soon she was his partner in and out of the ring. She began wrestling with a Native American gimmick as Blackfoot Sioux. Then, billed as Miss Linda, she became Street’s valet, a concept copied by many wrestlers. She carried his makeup to the ring, combed his hair between rounds. He sometimes entered the ring by walking over her back.
A decade later, Street was fed up with the top promoter Max Crabtree pushing his brother Shirley, AKA “Big Daddy”. The dislike was mutual. “He’d show his private parts on television if he thought he’d get attention,” Crabtree told the writer Simon Garfield. Street and Miss Linda left Britain for Stampede Wrestling, in Calgary, Canada, before spending the next 20 years mostly in regional promotions in the American south.
In Mid-South Wrestling he feuded with “Superstar” Bill Dundee. He worked well with Dusty Rhodes in the Florida and Mid-Atlantic territories; Rhodes’s son Dustin later wrestled in WWE as Goldust, a homage to Exotic Adrian. But he thrived for years in Ron Fuller’s Continental Wrestling, once even shocking fans by turning “babyface” (good guy) to save “Bullet” Bob Armstrong from Fuller’s Stud Stable. Despite Street being a regional rather than a national star in the US, Wrestling Observer Newsletter readers voted Exotic Adrian the “best gimmick” of 1986.
Settling in Gulf Breeze, Florida, Street and Linda ran the Skull Krusher Wrestling School and the Bizarre Bazaar, which designed costumes for wrestlers, including Mick Foley’s Dude Love suit and Mickey Rourke’s gear in the 2008 movie The Wrestler. In 2005, while being honoured at a Cauliflower Alley Club wrestling event, Street proposed to Miss Linda; they were married with Don Leo Jonathan serving as best man. Street won the NWA Alabama title in 2010, and wrestled his last match in 2014.
Starting with I Only Laugh When It Hurts (2012), he published seven volumes of memoirs, with titles including Sadist in Sequins or Imagine What I Could Do to You. The latter became the title of a television profile produced by the WWE Network. After Street and Linda returned to Wales in 2018, Joann Randles, inspired by Deller’s exhibition, produced and directed a 2019 documentary film about Street called You May Be Pretty But I Am Beautiful.
Street is survived by Linda. He had three children, Adrian, Vince and Amanda, from his first marriage, in 1962, to Jean Dawe, which ended in divorce.
• Adrian Street, wrestler, born 5 December 1940; died 24 July 2023
