Neil Simon, the playwright behind such comedic hits such as The Odd Couple and Plaza Suite, has died. He was 91.
Simon passed away Sunday morning in a Manhattan hospital.
He suffered complications from pneumonia, according to his longtime friend Bill Evans.
Simon was the American theater’s most successful and prolific playwright in the second half of the 20th century.
Neil Simon, the playwright behind such comedic hits such as The Odd Couple and Plaza Suite, has died. He was 91
He won three regular Tonys, plus one for special achievement, as well as a Pulitzer and the Mark Twain prize for humor.
Simon has received more combined Oscar and Tony nominations than any other writer.
His biggest hits included The Sunshine Boys, Plaza Suite, and Sweet Charity.
Many of his plays were adapted into movies and one, The Odd Couple, became a popular TV sitcom.
Simon dominated Broadway in a way that no other playwright has been able to match.
Simon was the American theater’s most successful and prolific playwright in the second half of the 20th century
He won three regular Tonys, plus one for special achievement, as well as a Pulitzer and the Mark Twain prize for humor. Simon is pictured here with actor James Coo in 1981
He released a new play almost every year from 1961 to 1993, only slowing his production in the later half of the 1990s.
At the same time Simon was also creating screenplays, ultimately writing 27 films – including film adaptations of his own stage productions.
Simon also wrote the scripts for five hit musicals and two volumes of memoirs.
Twice – in the late 1960s and in the mid-1980s – Simon had four shows on Broadway running at the same time.
A playwright has only ever done that once before, in the 1920s.
Simon is perhaps most famous for creating The Odd Couple, which premiered on Broadway in 1965.
Simon (pictured on Jay Leno in 1991) has received more combined Oscar and Tony nominations than any other writer
The play focuses on two very different men, Felix Ungar and Oscar Madison who become roommates after their respective divorces.
Simon also wrote the screenplay for the 1967 film adaptation, which became a huge hit starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau.
The play also turned into a hit sitcom that aired on ABC from 1970-1975, and was adapted again for another ABC show in 1982 and a CBS show in 2015 that starred Matthew Perry.
While Simon was massively popular on the stage and earned a slew of Tony nominations, it took decades for him to receive real respect from theater’s top critics.
That changed with Lost In Yonkers, Simon’s 1991 play about two teenagers who must live with their grandmother after their mother dies.
Lost In Yonkers earned Simon the Pulitzer Prize for drama and was the only play that year to be nominated by all five jury members, who called it ‘a mature work by an enduring (and often undervalued) American playwright’.
Simon was often underestimated by critics due to his love for gags and one-liners, becoming famous for firing off jokes one right after the other.
Some also took issue with the fact that he would turn serious themes into wise-cracking comedies.
But Simon’s entire mantra was to give audiences laughs instead of tears.
‘I have been accused by critics of trying to sugarcoat the pain with laughter,’ he write in his 1999 memoir The Play Goes On.
‘I always thought the humor was the instrument I used to first reach people and then, as an extension of the characters and stories, I would deliver the underlying issue, the pain that so many of us want to avoid at any cost.’
Simon was introduced to pain far early in life as a child of the Great Depression and a broken home.
He was born on July 4, 1927 in the Bronx neighborhood of Manhattan to Jewish parents.
Simon’s father and mother had a ‘tempestuous marriage’, as he once called it, with frequent screaming matches.
When he was just seven years old, Simon saw his father on the street with another woman. He told his mother but begged her to keep it a secret.
‘But when he came back, she insisted. “Go on, tell your father what you saw”. So I told him,’ Simon recalled in a past interview with the New York Times.
‘And he said: “You didn’t see me. You’re lying. You’re making it up”. I ended up getting it three ways.’
‘My mother betrayed me. I betrayed my father. And my father betrayed me. It was so awful it’s stayed with me my whole life.’
Simon found an escape through comedy, finding early teachers in the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy.
The young boy would often laugh so loud he would get kicked out of the theaters.
‘I think part of what made me a comedy writer is the blocking out of some of the really ugly, painful things in my childhood and covering it up with a humorous attitude.’
‘Do something to laugh until I was able to forget what was hurting.’