Simon cemented his success with The Odd Couple, a comedy about bickering roommates: Oscar, a gruff, slovenly sportswriter, and Felix, a neat, fussy photographer. Walter Matthau, as Oscar, and Art Carney, as Felix, starred on Broadway, with Matthau and Jack Lemmon playing the roles in a successful movie version.
Simon originally started as a radio and TV writer with his older brother, Danny. Yet Simon grew dissatisfied with television writing and the network restrictions that accompanied it. Out of his frustration came Come Blow Your Horn, which centred on two brothers (not unlike Danny and Neil Simon) trying to figure out what to do with their lives. The comedy ran for more than a year on Broadway.
But it was his second play, Barefoot in the Park, that really put Simon on the map. Critically well-received, the 1963 comedy, directed by Mike Nichols, concerned the tribulations of a pair of newlyweds, played by Elizabeth Ashley and Robert Redford, who lived on the top floor of a New York brownstone.
Simon cemented that success two years later with The Odd Couple, a comedy about bickering roommates: Oscar, a gruff, slovenly sportswriter, and Felix, a neat, fussy photographer. Walter Matthau, as Oscar, and Art Carney, as Felix, starred on Broadway, with Matthau and Jack Lemmon playing the roles in a successful movie version. Jack Klugman and Tony Randall appeared in the TV series, which ran on ABC from 1970 to 1975. A female stage version was done on Broadway in 1985, and a TV series revival was done in 2015 starring Matthew Perry.
Besides Sweet Charity (1966), which starred Gwen Verdon as a goodhearted dance-hall hostess, and Promises, Promises (1968), based on Billy Wilder’s film The Apartment, Simon wrote the books for several other musicals, including Little Me (1962), featuring a hardworking Sid Caesar in seven different roles, and They’re Playing Our Song (1979), which had music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager.
Many of his plays were turned into films as well. Besides The Odd Couple, he wrote the screenplays for movie versions of Barefoot in the Park, The Sunshine Boys, The Prisoner of Second Avenue and more.
Simon also wrote original screenplays, the best known being The Goodbye Girl, starring Richard Dreyfuss as a struggling actor, and The Heartbreak Kid, which featured Charles Grodin as a recently married man, lusting to drop his new wife for a blonde goddess played by Cybill Shepherd. Simon was married five times, twice to the same woman. He is survived by his fourth wife, actress Elaine Joyce; two daughters, Ellen and Nancy; three grandchildren; and one great-grandson.
Simon’s death also hit home for actor Matthew Broderick, who made his Broadway debut in Simon’s Brighton Beach Memoirs in 1983 and also that year made his movie debut in Simon’s Max Dugan Returns. “It was my great good fortune that my very first Broadway play was written by Neil Simon. He also wrote my first film. I owe him a career,” Broderick wrote. “The theatre has lost a brilliantly funny, unthinkably wonderful writer and even after all this time I feel I have lost a mentor, a father figure, a deep influence in my life and work.”—AP
Published in Dawn, August 28th, 2018