‘ODD COUPLE,’ ‘BRIGHTON BEACH’ PLAYWRIGHT NEIL SIMON, GIANT OF AMERICAN STAGE, DIES AT 91
NEW YORK — Playwright Neil Simon, a master of comedy whose laugh-filled hits such as “The Odd Couple,” “Barefoot in the Park” and his “Brighton Beach” trilogy dominated Broadway for decades, has died. He was 91.
Mr. Simon died early Sunday of complications from pneumonia surrounded by family at New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, said Bill Evans, his longtime friend and the Shubert Organization director of media relations.
In the second half of the 20th century, Mr. Simon was the American theater’s most successful and prolific playwright, often chronicling middle class issues and fears.
Starting with “Come Blow Your Horn” in 1961 and continuing into the next century, he rarely stopped working on a new play or musical. His list of credits is staggering.
Mr. Simon’s stage successes included “The Prisoner of Second Avenue,” “Last of the Red Hot Lovers,” “The Sunshine Boys,” “Plaza Suite,” “Chapter Two,” “Sweet Charity” and “Promises, Promises,” but there were other plays and musicals, too, more than 30 in all. Many of his plays were adapted into movies and one, “The Odd Couple,” even became a popular television series.
For seven months in 1967, he had four productions running at the same time on Broadway: “Barefoot in the Park”; “The Odd Couple”; “Sweet Charity”; and “The StarSpangled Girl.”
Even before he launched his theater career, he made history as one of the famed stable of writers for comedian Sid Caesar that also included Woody Allen, Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner.
Mr. Simon was the recipient of four Tony Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, the Kennedy Center honors (1995), four Writers Guild of America Awards and an American Comedy Awards Lifetime Achievement honor. In 1983, he even had a Broadway theater named after him when the Alvin was rechristened the Neil Simon Theatre.
In 2006, he won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, which honors work that draws from the American experience.
In a 1997 interview with The Washington Post, Mr. Simon reflected on his success. “I know that I have reached the pinnacle of rewards. There’s no more money anyone can pay me that I need. There are no awards they can give me that I haven’t won. I have no reason to write another play except that I am alive and I like to do it,” he said.
The bespectacled, mild-looking Mr. Simon (described in a New York Times magazine profile as looking like an accountant or librarian who dressed “just this side of drab”) was a relentless writer — and rewriter.
“I am most alive and most fulfilled sitting alone in a room, hoping that those words forming on the paper in the Smith-Corona will be the first perfect play ever written in a single draft,” Mr. Simon wrote in the introduction to one of the many anthologies of his plays.
He was a meticulous joke smith, peppering his plays, especially the early ones, with comic one-liners. His work often focused on middle-class, urban life.
“I don’t write social and political plays, because I’ve always thought the family was the microcosm of what goes on in the world,” he told The Paris Review in 1992.
Mr. Simon received his first Tony Award in 1965 as best author — a category now discontinued — for “The Odd Couple,” although the comedy lost the best-play prize to Frank D. Gilroy’s “The Subject Was Roses.” He won a best-play Tony 20 years later for “Biloxi Blues.” In 1991, “Lost in Yonkers” received both the Tony and the Pulitzer Prize. And there was a special achievement Tony, too, in 1975.
Mr. Simon’s own life figured most prominently in what became known as his “Brighton Beach” trilogy — “Brighton Beach Memoirs,” “Biloxi Blues” and “Broadway Bound” — which many consider his finest works. In them, Mr. Simon’s alter ego, Eugene Morris Jerome, makes his way from childhood to the U.S. Army to finally, on the verge of adulthood, a budding career as a writer.
Many of his plays were turned into films as well. Besides “The Odd Couple,” he wrote the screenplays for movie versions of “Barefoot in the Park,” “The Sunshine Boys,” “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” and more.
Mr. Simon also wrote original screenplays, the best known being “The Goodbye Girl,” starring Richard Dreyfuss as a struggling actor, and “The Heartbreak Kid.”
Mr. Simon was married five times, twice to the same woman. His first wife, Joan Baim, died of cancer in 1973 after 20 years of marriage. He then married actress Marsha Mason; they divorced in 1982. He was married to his third wife, Diane Lander, twice — once in 1987-1988 and again in 1990-1998. Mr. Simon married his fourth wife, actress Elaine Joyce, in 1999.