NEW YORK — David Johansen, the wiry, gravelly- voiced singer and last surviving member of the glam and protopunk band the New York Dolls who later performed as his campy, pompadoured alter ego, Buster Poindexter, died Friday. He was 75.

Johansen died at his home in New York City, according to Rolling Stone, citing a family spokesperson. It was revealed earlier this year that he had stage 4 cancer and a brain tumor.

The New York Dolls were forerunners of punk and the band’s style — teased hair, women’s clothes and lots of makeup — inspired the glam movement that took up residence in heavy metal a decade later in bands like Faster Pussycat and Mötley Crüe.

“The New York Dolls were more than musicians; they were a phenomenon. They drew on old rock ’n’ roll, big-city blues, show tunes, the Rolling Stones and girl groups, and that was just for starters,” Bill Bentley wrote in “Smithsonian Rock and Roll: Live and Unseen.”

The band never found commercial success and was torn by internal strife and drug addictions, breaking up after two albums by the middle of the decade. In 2004, former Smiths frontman and Dolls admirer Morrissey convinced Johansen and other surviving members to regroup for the Meltdown Festival in England, leading to three more studio albums.

In the ’80s, Johansen assumed the persona of Buster Poindexter, a pompadour-styled lounge lizard who had a hit with the kitschy party single “Hot, Hot, Hot” in 1987. He also appeared in such movies as “Candy Mountain,” “Let It Ride,” “Married to the Mob” and had a memorable turn as the Ghost of Christmas Past in Bill Murray-led hit “Scrooged.”

Johansen was in 2023 the subject of Martin Scorsese and David Tedeschi’s documentary “Personality Crisis: One Night Only,” which mixed footage of his two-night stand at the Café Carlyle in January 2020 with flashbacks through his wildly varied career and intimate interviews.

The Dolls — the final original lineup included guitarists Sylvain Sylvain and Johnny Thunders, bassist Arthur Kane and drummer Jerry Nolan — rubbed shoulders with Lou Reed and Andy Warhol in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the early 1970s.

They took their name from a toy hospital in Manhattan and were expected to take over the throne vacated by the Velvet Underground in the early 1970s. But neither of their first two albums — 1973’s “New York Dolls,” produced by Todd Rundgren, nor “Too Much Too Soon” a year later produced by Shadow Morton — charted.

The review of their debut album in Rolling Stone was complementary of their “strange combination of high pop-star drag and ruthless street arrogance.”

Their songs included “Personality Crisis” (“You got it while it was hot/ But now frustration and heartache is what you got”), “Looking for a Kiss” (I need a fix and a kiss”) and “Frankenstein” (Is it a crime/ For you to fall in love with Frankenstein?”).

Rolling Stone, reviewing their second album, called them “the best hard-rock band in America right now” and called Johansen a “talented showman, with an amazing ability to bring characters to life as a lyricist.”

Decades later, Rolling Stone would list their self-titled debut album at No. 301 of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, writing “it’s hard to imagine the Ramones or the Replacements or a thousand other trash-junky bands without them.”

The Dolls, representing rock at its most debauched, were divisive. In 1973, they won the Creem magazine poll categories as the year’s best and worst new group. They were nominated several times for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame but never got in.

Johansen is survived by his wife, Mara Hennessey, and a stepdaughter, Leah Hennessey.