FILM CRITIC WIELDED VICIOUS PEN.
Celebrated being ‘elitist’, loved to pan productions
John Simon, whose lively, erudite and ferociously acerbic columns on movies, music and theatre made him an influential and reviled critic, died Sunday at a hospital in Valhalla, N.Y. He was 94.
His wife, Patricia Hoag Simon, said the cause was a brain aneurysm.
Raised in the former Yugoslavia, where he learned German, Hungarian, French and English in addition to Serbo-croatian, Simon worked for six decades as a critic. A self-described elitist, he was best known for his 37 years as a theatre critic at New York magazine. He was dismissed three days before his 80th birthday after publishing a review about a “degrading, detestable” production of A Streetcar Named Desire.
Simon also wrote for Esquire, the New York Times and the National Review, and said his aim was to elevate the art of criticism, as well as art itself, regardless of how much he offended.
“The critic may make some allowances, but he cannot forget that there once was a Molière, a Chekhov, a Wilde, a Tennessee Williams,” he wrote in 2011.
Playwright David Mamet once christened Simon and the powerful Times critic Frank Rich “the syphilis and gonorrhea of the theatre.” In response, Simon quipped, “I don’t know about the syph, but what would the theatre be without a clap or two?”
Simon championed certain filmmakers, composers and theatrical works, but his pans far outnumbered his raves, with one reviewer calculating that of the 245 movies in Simon’s collection Reverse Angle: A Decade of American Films, he recommended 15. Nonetheless, Simon said, he never let imperfection dampen his enthusiasm.
He became known for his insulting descriptions of performers’ physical appearances, including those of Liza Minnelli, Kathleen Turner and Barbra Streisand.
John Simmon was born in what is now Serbia on May 12, 1925, later dropping the second “m” from his surname. He received his doctorate in comparative literature from Harvard in 1959, and taught there as well as at University of Washington and MIT.
Simon received a George Polk Award in Journalism for film criticism and published his first book, Acid Test, in 1963. Simon’s second wife, Patricia Hoag, a theatre arts professor, is his only immediate survivor.