London Suite

AuthorNeil Simon

Neil Simon

Neil Simon is one of America's most popular playwrights and screenwriters. He has written over thirty plays and nearly the same number of movie screenplays, most adapted from his plays. He has received more Oscar and Tony nominations than any other writer.

He was born on July 4, 1927, in The Bronx, New York, to Jewish parents. His father, Irving Simon, was a garment salesman, and his mother, Mamie Simon, was mostly a homemaker. Simon had one older brother by eight years, Danny Simon. He grew up in Washington Heights, Manhattan during the period of the Great Depression, graduating from DeWitt Clinton High School when he was sixteen, where he was nicknamed 'Doc' and described as extremely shy in the school yearbook.

Simon's childhood was difficult and mostly unhappy due to his parents' "tempestuous marriage", and ongoing financial hardship caused by the Depression. His father often abandoned the family for months at a time, causing them further financial and emotional hardship. As a result, Simon and his brother Danny were sometimes forced to live with relatives, or else their parents took in boarders for some income. Simon recalls this period:

'The horror of those years was that I didn't come from one broken home but five. It got so bad at one point that we took in a couple of butchers who paid their rent in lamb chops. To this day I never really knew what the reason for all the fights and battles were about between my parents.... she'd hate him and be very angry, but he would come back and she would take him back. She really loved him.'

Simon points out that one of the reasons he became a writer was his need to be independent of such family concerns when growing up:

"It's partly why I became a writer, because I learned to fend for myself very early... I began to think early on, at the age of seven or eight, that I'd better start taking care of myself somehow, emotionally... It made me strong as an independent person."

In order to get away from difficulties at home he often took refuge in movie theatres, where he especially enjoyed comedies with silent stars like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Laurel and Hardy. Simon recalls:

"I was constantly being dragged out of movies for laughing too loud. 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."

Simon attributes these childhood movies for inspiring him to write comedy:

"I wanted to make a whole audience fall onto the floor, writhing and laughing so hard that some of them pass out. Chaplin's ability to make people laugh was the only thing that I saw in the future for myself as a connection with people. I was never going to be an athlete or a doctor."

At the age of fifteen, Simon and his brother created a series of comedy sketches for employees at an annual department store event. During these high-school years, he also enjoyed reading humour by Mark Twain, Robert Benchley, George S. Kaufman and S. J. Perelman. He recalls:

"I read humourists... I read all the adventure stories... I was at the library three days a week as a kid. I read everything, I think, except the classics - which I'm going to get to one day."

After graduating high school he signed up with the Army Air Force Reserve at New York University, eventually being sent to Colorado as a corporal. It was during those years in the Reserve that Simon started writing, initially as a sports editor. He also began writing comedy scripts for radio and some popular early television shows. Among them were The Phil Silvers Show and Sid Caesar's Your Show of Shows in 1950, where he worked alongside other young writers including Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks and Selma Diamond.

Soon he started to write his own plays beginning with Come Blow Your Horn (1961), which took him three years to complete and ran for 678 performances on Broadway. It was followed by two more successful plays, Barefoot in the Park (1963) and The Odd Couple (1965), for which he won a Tony Award, making him a national celebrity and "the hottest new playwright on Broadway." His style ranged from romantic comedy to farce to more serious dramatic comedy. Overall, he has garnered seventeen Tony nominations and won three. During one season, he had four successful plays showing on Broadway at the same time, and in 1983 became the only living playwright to have a New York theatre, the Neil Simon Theatre, named in his honour. During the time between the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, he wrote both original screenplays and stage plays, with some films actually based on his plays.

After winning the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1991 for Lost in Yonkers, critics began to take notice of the depths, complexity and issues of universal interest in his stories, which expressed serious concerns of most average people. His comedies were based around subjects such as marital conflict, infidelity, sibling rivalry, adolescence, and fear of aging. Most of his plays were also partly autobiographical, portraying his troubled childhood and different stages of his life, creating characters who were typically New Yorkers and often Jewish, like himself. Simon's facility with dialogue gives his stories a rare blend of realism, humour and seriousness which audiences find easy to identify with.

Simon has been married five times: to dancer Joan Baim (1953-1973), actress Marsha Mason (1973-1981), twice to Diane Lander (1987-1988 and 1990-1998), and currently actress Elaine Joyce. He is the father of Nancy and Ellen, from his first marriage, and Bryn, Lander's daughter from a previous relationship, whom he adopted.

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