Neil Simon

Marvin Neil Simon (July 4, 1927 – August 26, 2018) was an American playwright, screenwriter and author. He wrote more than 30 plays and nearly the same number of movie screenplays, mostly film adaptations of his plays. He received three Tony Awards and a Golden Globe Award, as well as nominations for four Academy Awards and four Primetime Emmy Awards. He was awarded a Special Tony Award in 1975, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1991, the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995 and the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor in 2006.

Simon grew up in New York City during the Great Depression. His parents' financial difficulties affected their marriage, giving him a mostly unhappy and unstable childhood. He often took refuge in movie theaters, where he enjoyed watching early comedians like Charlie Chaplin. After graduating from high school and serving a few years in the Army Air Force Reserve, he began writing comedy scripts for radio programs and popular early television shows. Among the latter were Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows (where in 1950 he worked alongside other young writers including Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart and Selma Diamond), and The Phil Silvers Show, which ran from 1955 to 1959.

His first produced play was Come Blow Your Horn (1961). It took him three years to complete and ran for 678 performances on Broadway. It was followed by two more successes, Barefoot in the Park (1963) and The Odd Couple (1965). He won a Tony Award for the latter. It made him a national celebrity and "the hottest new playwright on Broadway". Neil had one brother, eight years his senior, television writer and comedy teacher Danny Simon. He grew up in Washington Heights, Manhattan, and graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School when he was sixteen. He was nicknamed 'Doc', and the school yearbook described him as extremely shy.

Simon's childhood was marked by his parents' "tempestuous marriage" and the financial hardship caused by the Depression. Sometimes at night he blocked out their arguments by putting a pillow over his ears. His father often abandoned the family for months at a time, causing them further financial and emotional suffering. As a result, the family took in boarders, and Simon and his brother Danny were sometimes forced to live with different relatives.

text=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. He made writing comedy his long-term goal, and also saw it as a way to connect with people. "I was never going to be an athlete or a doctor." Simon later wrote scripts for The Phil Silvers Show, for episodes broadcast during 1958 and 1959.

Simon later recalled the importance of these two writing jobs to his career: "Between the two of them, I spent five years and learned more about what I was eventually going to do than in any other previous experience."

Simon described a typical writing session:

text=There were about seven writers, plus Sid, Carl Reiner, and Howie Morris ... Mel Brooks and maybe Woody Allen would write one of the other sketches ... everyone would pitch in and rewrite, so we all had a part of it ... It was probably the most enjoyable time I ever had in writing with other people.

In 1961, Simon's first Broadway play, Come Blow Your Horn, ran for 678 performances at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre. Simon took three years to create that first play, partly because he was also working on television scripts. He rewrote it at least twenty times from beginning to end: "It was the lack of belief in myself", he recalled. "I said, 'This isn't good enough. It's not right.' ... It was the equivalent of three years of college."

Barefoot in the Park (1963) and The Odd Couple (1965), for which he won a Tony Award, brought him national celebrity, and he was considered "the hottest new playwright on Broadway", according to Susan Koprince. The Star-Spangled Girl, The Odd Couple and Barefoot in the Park. These earned him royalties of $1 million a year.

Simon also adapted material originated by others, such as the musical Little Me (1962), based on the novel by Patrick Dennis; Sweet Charity (1966) from the screenplay for the film Nights of Cabiria (1957), written by Federico Fellini and others; and Promises, Promises (1968) a musical version of Billy Wilder's film, The Apartment. By the time of Last of the Red Hot Lovers in 1969, Simon was reputedly earning $45,000 a week from his shows (excluding sale of rights), making him the most financially successful Broadway writer ever. Simon also served as an uncredited "script doctor", helping to hone the books of Broadway-bound plays or musicals under development, as he did for A Chorus Line (1975). During the 1970s, he wrote a string of successful plays; sometimes more than one was playing at the same time, to standing room only audiences. Although he was, by then, recognized as one of the country's leading playwrights, his inner drive kept him writing: text=Did I relax and watch my boyhood ambitions being fulfilled before my eyes? Not if you were born in the Bronx, in the Depression and Jewish, you don't.

Following Lost in Yonkers, Simon's next several plays did not meet with commercial success. The Dinner Party (2000), which starred Henry Winkler and John Ritter, was "a modest hit". and received poor reviews.

Screen Simon chose not to write the screenplay for the first film adaptation of his work, Come Blow Your Horn (1963), preferring to focus on his playwriting. However, he was disappointed with the picture, and thereafter tried to control the conversion of his works. Simon wrote screenplays for more than twenty films and received four Academy Award nominations—for The Odd Couple (1969), The Sunshine Boys (1975), The Goodbye Girl (1977) and California Suite (1978). Other movies include The Out-of-Towners (1970) and Murder by Death (1976). Although most of his films were successful, movies were always of secondary importance to his plays:

Writing style and subject matter The key aspect most consistent in Simon's writing style is comedy, situational and verbal, and presents serious subjects in a way that makes audiences "laugh to avoid weeping".

Simon's nephew is U.S. District Judge Michael H. Simon and his niece-in-law is U.S. Congresswoman Suzanne Bonamici.

Simon was on the board of selectors of Jefferson Awards for Public Service.

In 2004, Simon received a kidney transplant from his long-time friend and publicist Bill Evans.

Simon died from pneumonia at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan on August 26, 2018, while hospitalized for kidney failure. He was 91 and also had Alzheimer's disease.

Awards and honors

Simon held three honorary degrees: a Doctor of Humane Letters from Hofstra University, a Doctor of Letters from Marquette University and a Doctor of Law from Williams College. In 1983 Simon became the only living playwright to have a New York City theatre named after him. The Alvin Theatre on Broadway was renamed the Neil Simon Theatre in his honor, and he was an honorary board of trustees member of the Walnut Street Theatre, Philadelphia, America's oldest theatre. Also in 1983, Simon was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

In 1965, he won the Tony Award for Best Playwright (The Odd Couple), and in 1975, a special Tony Award for his overall contribution to American theater. Simon won the 1978 Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay for The Goodbye Girl. For Brighton Beach Memoirs (1983), he was awarded the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, followed by another Tony Award for Best Play of 1985, Biloxi Blues. along with the Tony Award for Lost in Yonkers (1991). is a professional summer repertory theatre devoted to preserving the works of Simon and his contemporaries. The Neil Simon Festival was founded by Richard Dean Bugg in 2003.

In 2006, Simon received the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor.