Writer Neil Simon was Broadway’s master of comedy
NEW YORK » Playwright Neil Simon, a master of comedy whose laugh-filled hits such as “The Odd Couple,” “Barefoot in the Park” and the “Brighton Beach” trilogy dominated Broadway for decades, has died. He was 91.
Simon died early Sunday of complications from pneumonia at New York Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan, said Bill Evans, a longtime friend and spokesman for Shubert Organization theaters.
In the second half of the 20th century, 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.
The theater world quickly mourned his death. Tony Award-winning actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein tweeted that Simon “could write a joke that would make you laugh, define the character, the situation, and even the world’s problems.”
Matthew Broderick, who in 1983 made his Broadway debut in Simon’s “Brighton Beach Memoirs” and his movie debut in Simon’s “Max Dugan Returns,” said: “I owe him a career. The theater has lost a brilliantly funny, unthinkably wonderful writer. And even after all this time, I feel I have lost a mentor, a father figure, a deep influence in my life and work.”
For seven months in 1967, Simon had four productions running at the same time on Broadway: “Barefoot in the Park,” “The Odd Couple,” “Sweet Charity” and “The Star-Spangled 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.
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, a Broadway theater was 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. The previous year saw a popular revival of “The Odd Couple,” reuniting Broderick and Nathan Lane after their enormous success in “The Producers” several years earlier.
In a 1997 interview with The Washington Post, 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.”
Many of his plays were turned into films. Besides “The Odd Couple,” Simon wrote the screenplays for movie versions of “Barefoot in the Park,” “The Sunshine Boys,” “The Prisoner of Second Avenue” and more.
He also wrote original screenplays, the best known being “The Goodbye Girl,” starring Richard Dreyfuss as a struggling actor, and “The Heartbreak Kid,” which featured Charles Grodin as a recently married man, lusting to drop his new wife for a blonde goddess played by Cybill Shepherd.
“I suspect I shall keep on writing in a vain search for that perfect play. I hope I will keep my equilibrium and sense of humor when I’m told I haven’t achieved it,” Simon once said about his voluminous output of work. “At any rate, the trip has been wonderful. As George and Ira Gershwin said, ‘They Can’t Take That Away From Me.’ ”