Johansen died Friday at his home in Staten Island, his stepdaughter, Leah Hennessey, said.

Hennessy revealed that Johansen had been battling Stage 4 cancer for a decade, had brain tumor and had broken his back in a fall after Thanksgiving. The family asked for donations to help with medical expenses.

“We went into a room and just recorded,” he said in interview with Esquire. “It wasn’t like these people who conceptualize things. It was just a document of what was going on at the time.”

While their messy first LP didn’t sell very well, it would wind up on countless best-of lists over the years and influence the Ramones, Kiss, the Sex Pistols and Morrissey.

When the Dolls’ follow-up, 1974’s Too Much Too Soon, produced by Shadow Morton, also failed commercially, they were dropped by Mercury after chaotic national tour. They disbanded after a December 1976 show at Max’s Kansas City, a club near their East Village stomping grounds.

“The New York Dolls were the purest form of rock ’n’ roll, and they invoked the kind of energy that can’t be sustained without damaging the hosts and is virtually impossible to distil for mass consumption,” Nina Antonia wrote in Too Much Too Soon, her 1998 book about the band.

The rollicking “Hot Hot Hot” peaked at No. 42 on the Billboard Hot 100 and got lots of airplay on MTV — though he often called his biggest hit “the bane of my existence.”

It led to an acting career, with Johansen playing the Ghost of Christmas Past — here a chain-smoking taxi driver — in Richard Donner’s Scrooged (1988), starring Bill Murray.

He then portrayed another cab driver, Looney, the best friend of Richard Dreyfuss’ gambler, in the horse-racing comedy Let It Ride (1989).

“Every singer who’s worth his salt is an actor,” he once said. “You play different characters in different songs. Sometimes you’re a romantic lead, sometimes you’re this madcap party barbarian. You play all these roles, running through every aspect of emotion.”

One of six kids, David Roger Johansen was born on Staten Island on Jan. 9, 1950. His mother, Helen, was a librarian, and his father, John, sold insurance and liked to sing opera around the house.

Johansen played in local bands and acted in plays for Charles Ludlum’s Ridiculous Theater before Kane and original Dolls drummer Billy Murcia knocked on the door of his apartment on East 6th Street and recruited him to be their singer.

As they earned a cult following in lower Manhattan, the Dolls played R&B with reckless abandon and wore makeup, high heels and satin — some thought they were gay —and got to open for Rod Stewart in London. (During that trip, Murcia died of an accidental drug overdose.)

After the Dolls signed with Mercury in March 1973, they took to the road. In a 2004 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Johansen said he was arrested onstage in Memphis and spent a night in jail for inciting riot. He was “dressed like Liza Minnelli at the time, and it wasn’t the most relaxing night I ever had,” he noted.

As Poindexter, he performed on six episodes of Saturday Night Live during its 12th season (1986-87) and released four albums over a decade as his alter ego after signing with RCA.

David Johansen & the Harry Smiths — named for the man who compiled 1952’s Anthology of American Folk Music — recorded country blues albums in 2000 and 2002 before he took part in a Dolls reunion, sparked in 2004 by Morrissey, that spawned the highly regarded 2006 LP One Day It Will Please Us to Remember Even This. That version of the band lasted about eight years,

Johansen showed up on episodes of Miami Vice in 1985 and The Equalizer in 1987, and he also appeared in Candy Mountain (1987) — fellow musicians Tom Waits, Leon Redbone, Dr. John, Joe Strummer and Arto Lindsay were in that, too — Married to the Mob (1988), Freejack (1992), The Tic Code (1998) and 200 Cigarettes (1999).

With his health issues, he hadn’t been able to perform for the past five years.

Johansen hosted a SiriusXM program called Mansion of Fun and was the subject of the 2023 documentary Personality Crisis: One Night Only, co-directed by Scorsese and David Tedeschi and built around a Café Carlyle show. He had done songs for Scorsese’s Boardwalk Empire and Vinyl HBO series.