Neil Simon, the playwright and screenwriter whose indestructible comedies \u2014 including \u201cThe Odd Couple,\u201d \u201cBarefoot in the Park,\u201d \u201cThe Sunshine Boys\u201d and \u201cBrighton Beach Memoirs\u201d \u2014 made him one of the most successful writers in American history, has died. He was 91.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
A member of the famed \u201cYour Show of Shows\u201d writing staff for Sid Caesar, Simon was an entertainment mainstay for more than six decades. Starting with his first Broadway success, \u201cCome Blow Your Horn\u201d (1961), there was seldom a time when a Neil Simon work couldn\u2019t be found on stage or screen (or, occasionally, television).<\/p>\n
At one point, in the late 1960s, he had four shows on Broadway at once.<\/p>\n
Because of his works\u2019 commercial power, Mr. Simon\u2019s stage and film projects often attracted big names, including Robert Redford, Jane Fonda,\u00a0Walter Matthau<\/a>,\u00a0Jack Lemmon<\/a>, Nathan Lane and Maggie Smith.<\/p>\n He helped make a star of Matthew Broderick with \u201cBrighton Beach Memoirs\u201d (1983), which ran for three years on Broadway. That play centers on Mr. Simon\u2019s 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, \u201cWhat would you tell your father if he came home and I was dead on the kitchen floor?\u201d<\/p>\n Eugene: \u201cI\u2019d say, \u2018Don\u2019t go in the kitchen, Pa!\u2019\u200a\u201d<\/p>\n His crowning early comic achievement was \u201cThe Odd Couple\u201d (1965), which became a\u00a0hit film\u00a0<\/a>and\u00a0TV sitcom<\/a>\u00a0and introduced two characters now embedded in pop culture: the sloppy, fun-loving Oscar Madison and the fussy neatnik Felix Ungar. The friends \u2014 one divorced, the other about to be \u2014 share a New York apartment and bicker like spouses.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Neil Simon, the playwright and screenwriter...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9670","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9670","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9670"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9670\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9671,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9670\/revisions\/9671"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9670"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9670"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9670"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}