Playwright who ruled Broadway
AS THE playwright behind The Odd Couple, Barefoot In The Park and Biloxi Blues, Neil Simon knew how to strike the perfect balance between humour and suffering. Wanting his audience to feel a roller coaster of emotions, Simon drew upon his own personal experiences of family dysfunction, pain and grief to make light of the banalities of human existence.
It was this fine ability to tap into his audiences’ consciousness which brought him resounding success. With crowds turning up in their droves, in 1966 Simon had four plays running on Broadway at the same time.
By 1983 he was named the most notable comedy writer in the English language but the self-deprecating Simon could never quite believe his own success.
“It’s as if this is happening to the outside me, that dumb, shallow introvert,” he once said. “The writer in me, who is so much more knowledgeable and perceptive, the guy who really deserves the credit, just stands there watching.”
Born in the Bronx, New York, Marvin Neil Simon was the son of Irving, a garment manufacturer and his wife Mamie. He grew up in a household filled with conflict, often triggered by his rowing parents’ onoff relationship.
When he was seven Simon began writing comedy as a way of blocking out the “really ugly painful things in my childhood” and through the medium of laughter he escaped the oppressive atmosphere at home.
Often visiting the cinema, Simon was amused and then inspired by watching Charlie Chaplin and Ernst Lubitsch movies, and with his older brother Danny devised comedy sketches.
Receiving a positive reception, he would go to the local library to read books on famous comedians to help him learn the tricks of the trade.
He attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and studied at New York University, before starting as a clerk at Warner Brothers.
Simon would read the comedy radio shows he had written to his colleagues, which were often met with fits of hysterics.
Moving into television, he wrote comedy scripts for Sid Caesar’s and Phil Silvers’ shows, working with Woody Allen and Carl Reiner.
Meanwhile Simon continued to work on his own plays, developing Come Blow Your Horn which was a fictionalised version of his upbringing.
It opened on Broadway in 1961 and enjoyed relative success. To Simon this was a light-bulb moment: “The theatre and I discovered each other,” he would say.
His next play, Barefoot In The Park, was a comedic account of his marriage to Joan Baim.
Convinced it would be a failure before it had even begun, Simon begged the producer to pull the play. However, to his disbelief Barefoot In The Park proved to be a runaway success, became one of Broadway’s longest-running plays and propelled him to Hollywood fame when it was made into a movie starring Jane Fonda and Robert Redford.
When his first wife Joan died of cancer in 1973, Simon went on to marry the actress Marsha Mason and the 1977 play Chapter Two was written as a tribute to Mason, who stoically tolerated his long-lasting despair over his first wife.
However the pair divorced after 10 years and the writer went on to marry three more times, including twice to his third wife Diane Lander.
Simon was the only living person to have had a Broadway theatre named for him.
He received an incredible 16 Tony nominations and won best play three times. He also earned four Oscar nominations, a Pulitzer Prize, the Mark Twain Prize and countless other honours.
He died in Manhattan, New York, from pneumonia and is survived by his fifth wife Elaine and daughters Nancy, Ellen and Bryn.