Playwright Neil Simon reportedly dead at 91

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.

Because of his works’ commercial power, Mr. Simon’s stage and film projects often attracted big names, including Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Walter Matthau, Jack Lemmon, Nathan Lane and Maggie Smith.

He helped make a star of Matthew Broderick with “Brighton Beach Memoirs” (1983), which ran for three years on Broadway. That play centers on Mr. Simon’s stage alter ego, Eugene Jerome, whose thoughts at 14 mostly run to sex and baseball. He uses wisecracks to deal with an overbearing mother, who asks him, “What would you tell your father if he came home and I was dead on the kitchen floor?”

Eugene: “I’d say, ‘Don’t go in the kitchen, Pa!’ ”

His crowning early comic achievement was “The Odd Couple” (1965), which became a hit film and TV sitcom and introduced two characters now embedded in pop culture: the sloppy, fun-loving Oscar Madison and the fussy neatnik Felix Ungar. The friends — one divorced, the other about to be — share a New York apartment and bicker like spouses.