Prolific US playwright Neil Simon dead at 91
new york — Neil Simon, the prolific and Pulitzer Prize-winning US playwright who wrote for stage, television and cinema, and won more Oscar and Tony nominations combined than any other writer, died on Sunday. He was 91.
A legend of American theatre, Simon was credited with shaping American humor in the 1960s and 1970s in a vein similar to film director Woody Allen, with a focus on life in the big city and family conflict.
His death, early on Sunday in a New York hospital of complications from pneumonia, was announced by his longtime friend Bill Evans.
His wife, daughter and grandson were at his bedside, Evans said. He had represented Simon for three decades from 1976 to 2006.
Simon was the author of critically acclaimed and commercial
hits such as The Odd Couple (1965)
The Sunshine Boys (1974) Barefoot in the Park (1963) and Lost in Yonkers (1990).
Several of his plays went on to become major Hollywood movies, including The Goodbye Girl in 1977 that won Richard Dreyfuss an Oscar for best leading actor and The
Odd Couple in 1968 about two friends sharing an apartment starring Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon.
While several of his plays were darker, he was best known as the king of comedy, peppering his plays with witty one-liners.
Much of his work explored the everyday struggles of the middleclasses, or what he called “domestic wars” and inter-family conflict, influenced by his troubled upbringing in the Bronx during the Great Depression in a family where money was scarce.
“He was a writer and an artist who couldn’t stop going inside of himself and finding new things. Like any creative artist there was a compulsion to explore and go deeper,” Evans said.
“He wrote every single day. He went to his office, a nondescript office and wrote,” he added. “He found a connection in all of us.”
Simon first made a name for himself in the early 1960s, starting with Barefoot in the Park, about a bickering married couple, and The
Odd Couple credited with capturing the zeitgeist of that decade.
“The phrase ‘odd couple’ is now
used in so many different contexts. It was a privilege knowing him,” said Evans.
Simon followed up in the 1980s
with trilogy Brighton Beach Memoirs, Biloxi Blues and Broadway Bound in which the leading character Eugene Jerome is an alter ego for the playwright himself.
The trilogy starred a young Matthew Broderick, now the celebrated stage actor and husband of film star Sarah Jessica Parker, as the leading character in what Evans called a “Slice of Americana.”
In 1991, Simon achieved the highest honor in US drama, winning the Pulitzer Prize for “Lost in Yonkers,” an autobiographical comedy about a mother and her daughter, which was his last big splash on Broadway.