David Johansen, the larger-than-life frontman of the 1970s proto-punk band New York Dolls, has died. He was 75.

The singer’s daughter, Leah Hennessey, told PEOPLE that Johansen died in his New York City residence on Friday, Feb. 28.

“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,” she said in a statement. “After a decade of profoundly compromised health, he died of natural causes.”

“David and his family were deeply moved by the outpouring of love and support they’ve experienced recently as the result of having gone public with their challenges,” Hennessey continued. “He was thankful that he had a chance to be in touch with so many friends and family before he passed.”

Hennessey made a public plea for support to Johansen’s fans on Feb. 10, revealing that he’d been privately battling cancer for “most of the past decade.”

Johansen then told Rolling Stone, “We’ve been living with my illness for a long time, still having fun, seeing friends and family, carrying on,” but a fall around Thanksgiving 2024 “brought us to a whole new level of debilitation.”

Johansen was born in Staten Island in 1950 and wasted no time taking New York City by storm. In early 1971 he joined guitarist and pianist Sylvain Sylvain, bassist Arthur Kane, drummer Jerry Nolan, and guitarist Johnny Thunders to form the flashy, in-your-face rock band New York Dolls. By that Christmas, the group had already been tapped to join Rod Stewart on tour.

Alongside bands like the Velvet Underground, the Stooges, and MC5, New York Dolls would revolutionize rock and punk music, and the culture at large. Reflecting on his time with the band, Johansen told NPR’s Terry Gross in a 2004 interview, “We were really such a gang, and it was like us against the world, and we were really trying to evolve music into something new, and it was, you know, very kind of almost militant to us.”

While the Dolls only lasted until 1975, Johansen went on to have a long and fruitful career in music, film, television, and beyond.

Following the dissolution of New York Dolls, Johansen would release four solo albums and two live albums under his own name, four albums under the pseudonym Buster Poindexter, and two additional albums as David Johansen and the Harry Smiths.

He opened for and performed with acts like the Who, Blondie, and Pat Benatar over the years, eventually appearing twice as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live as Buster Poindexter.

Johansen also successfully parlayed his skills into acting, appearing in experimental films like John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s Up Your Legs Forever in the early ’70s and making cameo appearances in TV series like Miami Vice and The Equalizer. He graduated to bigger roles like his three-episode stint on the HBO drama Oz, a role in the Mick Jagger and Emilio Estevez film Freejack, a memorable part as the Ghost of Christmas Past in Scrooged, and most recently the voice of Beartaur in the Netflix animated series Centaurworld.

Martin Scorsese directed a documentary about Johansen called Personality Crisis: One Night Only in 2022.

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The musician is survived by daughter Leah and wife Mara Hennessey.