Neil Simon, the playwright and screenwriter whose indestructible comedies – including “The Odd Couple,” “Barefoot in the Park,” “The Sunshine Boys” and “Brighton Beach Memoirs” – made him one of the most successful writers in American history, has died. He was 91.
The cause of death was complications with pneumonia, according to his publicist, Bill Evans. Simon died around 1 a.m. Sunday at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City.
A member of the famed “Your Show of Shows” writing staff for Sid Caesar, Simon was an entertainment mainstay for more than six decades. Starting with his first Broadway success, “Come Blow Your Horn” (1961), there was seldom a time when a Neil Simon work couldn’t be found on stage or screen (or, occasionally, television).
At one point, in the late 1960s, he had four shows on Broadway at once.
Even a partial list of his works summons the comic highlights of late 20th-century American theater: “Barefoot in the Park.” “The Odd Couple.” “Sweet Charity.” “Plaza Suite.” “The Last of the Red Hot Lovers.” “The Prisoner of Second Avenue.” “Brighton Beach Memoirs.” “Lost in Yonkers.” “Laughter on the 23rd Floor.”
And that’s just for starters. Simon wrote more than 30 plays.
Add in his original screenplays – such as “The Out-of-Towners,” “The Heartbreak Kid,” “The Goodbye Girl” and “Seems Like Old Times” – and one can get a sense of Simon’s dominance.
“The Odd Couple,” Simon’s play about two mismatched bachelors who share a New York apartment, has had a particularly remarkable life.
Its first appearance was as a 1965 Broadway play that won Tonys for Simon, star Walter Matthau and director Mike Nichols. Three years later, it became a hit film starring Matthau and Jack Lemmon. In 1970, it was turned into a long-running television series with Jack Klugman and Tony Randall. There have been versions featuring women, African-Americans and cartoon characters, as well as a 1998 film sequel.
Paramount Pictures was so excited to obtain the movie rights in 1964 that it paid $175,000 to Simon based on a 40-word synopsis.
Simon said he misjudged the work. “I thought it was a grim, dark play about two lonely men,” he told the Paris Review in 1994, in an interview conducted by “Inside the Actors Studio’s” James Lipton.
He received 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 honors. There’s a Broadway theater named for him; he was the only living person to have received such recognition.
“No playwright in Broadway’s long and raucous history has so dominated the boulevard as the softly astringent Simon,” The New Yorker’s John Lahr wrote in 2010. “For almost half a century, his comedies have offered light at the end of whatever dark tunnel America has found itself in.”
