So working on that was really a matter of life and death.” And I would go out there and I would never have the aspirations fulfilled that I had for myself. If I didn’t do it, if I didn’t make it, if I gave up on it at any one time, would be over for me. “I don’t know if it was confidence as much as it was fear,” he continued about the experience of writing his first play. “I wanted to be a playwright I wanted to be a real writer,” Simon said in a 1997 interview on Theater Talk shortly after his book Rewrites was released. His first Broadway play with a writing credit line all his own came in 1961 with Come Blow Your Horn, quickly followed by Barefoot in the Park, starring Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley, in 1963. Simon transitioned to writing for the stage, putting together sketches for To Catch a Star in 1955 with his brother. “I knew when I walked into Your Show of Shows that this was the most talented group of writers that up until that time had ever been assembled,” he once said. Simon’s experience working as a junior writer inspired his 1993 play Laughter on the 23rd Floor. His first big writing break came in 1950 with Your Show of Shows, Caesar’s live sketch comedy series, where he and his older brother, Danny, collaborated with such writers as Mel Brooks, Woody Allen, Larry Gelbart, Mel Tolkin and Carl Reiner. He attended the University of Denver from 1945-46. He was assigned to Lowry Air Force Base in Denver in 1945, where he worked for the Army newspaper as the sports editor. Simon began writing after he signed up with the Army Air Force Reserve at New York University. “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.” “It’s partly why I became a writer, because I learned to fend for myself very early,” Simon once said. He graduated at age 16 from DeWitt Clinton High School, where he earned the nickname “Doc.” His parents’ financial difficulties affected their marriage, and Simon’s childhood was an unhappy one. His father, Irving, was a garment salesman and his mother, Mamie, a homemaker. They are not all bad or all good they are people we know.”īorn Marvin Neil Simon in the Bronx in 1927, Simon grew up in Washington Heights during the Great Depression. “Neil has the ability to write characters - even the leading characters that we’re supposed to root for - that are absolutely flawed,” Jack Lemmon, who starred as Felix Ungar in the 1968 film adaptation of Simon’s The Odd Couple, once said of the writer. His unrelenting wisecracks and approachable tone made him an audience favorite. However, it was for the stage that Simon honed his quintessential style and invented the stage dramedy, extracting humor out of daily life. The only playwright to have four Broadway productions running simultaneously (that was in the 1960s, when he was earning a reported $60,000 a week), Simon earned countless other awards, including the Mark Twain Prize for Comedy in 2006 and Kennedy Center Honors in 1995.Ī master of the set-’em-up, knock-’em-down style of comedy, Simon helped build the sitcom form as a writer on such 1950s hits as Sid Caesar’s Your Show of Shows and The Phil Silvers Show.
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