Neil Simon: Playwright whose comic genius lit up Broadway 1927-2017
● Neil Simon, who has died at the age of 91, was one of the world’s most successful playwrights and had a Broadway theatre named after him, an accolade to which neither Tennessee Williams nor Arthur Miller can lay claim.
Simon, who won three competitive Tony Awards alongside a special Tony in 1975 for overall achievement, received the vaunted Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1991 for his play Lost in Yonkers — one of several works that led commentators to argue the case for a depth to his work at its best that lifted him well beyond the level of the polished one-liner for which the creator of The Odd Couple on stage, screen, and television was so revered.
From his Broadway debut in 1961 with Come Blow Your Horn onwards, rare was the season — for the better part of a quarter of a century, anyway — that did not snap to comic attention with one or another Simon premiere.
Simon’s work was catnip for actors, many of whom walked away with trophies: the original Broadway production of Lost in Yonkers garnered four Tonys, three for its stars — Mercedes Ruehl, Irene Worth, and Kevin Spacey — and the other for best play.
In addition to his plays, he wrote the book for various musicals that are considered benchmarks of their era — Sweet Charity, Little Me and Promises, Promises among them — as well as numerous films including The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Murder By Death (1976) and, in 1977, The Goodbye Girl, which brought Simon an Oscar nomination alongside a Golden Globe Award. Richard Dreyfuss, aged 29, won an Oscar for his performance.
The Odd Couple was characterised by its creator back in the day as a “grim dark play about two lonely men” that nonetheless went on to become comic gold, spawning multiple versions.
The play contains an abundance of Simon’s celebrated one-liners, such as one of the men who make up the couple telling the other: “You’re the only man in the world with clenched hair.”
For a long time, Simon’s hit rate was unassailable. Among his other successes was California Suite, the 1978 film of which won Maggie Smith her second Oscar, as well as Barefoot in the Park and The Sunshine Boys.
“When an audience laughed, I felt fulfilled,” Simon once wrote.—
© The Daily Telegraph, London