Latest in Neil Simon

The lights on Broadway dimmed tonight for a minute as a tribute to playwright Neil Simon, who died Sunday at age 91. Simon, the creator of Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple and so many other Broadway staples, was remembered earlier in the afternoon by a gathering of friends and family at the Frank E. Campbell…

In 1977 Carl Reiner directed Oh, God!, starring octogenarian George Burns, then the elder statesman of comedy. Today, at 96, it is Reiner who is comedy's elder statesman—still funny and still sharp, despite the inevitable ailments that come with a long life. "I’m at the age now where you see doctors every day," he…

It is ironic that Neil Simon, who died today at 91, got his inspiration to become a comedy writer from the movies into which he constantly escaped to forget the circumstances of his poor depression-era childhood. Even though he grew up in Washington Heights, much closer to Broadway than Hollywood, it was always the mov…

Refresh for updates. An outpouring of fond remembrances is filling the online world as news of Neil Simon’s death spreads. Actors and others who worked with him saluted his career, and those who merely enjoyed his works also shared their thoughts on one of the world’s most popular playwrights. Simon died last night in…

Neil Simon, the creator of such Pulitzer and Tony award-winning plays as The Odd Couple, Barefoot in the Park and Lost in Yonkers, has died at 91. He died last night at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City from complications from pneumonia. Simon was a giant of popular content creation, the playwright…

UPDATE with more information. Louis Zorich, whose stage career reached back more than half a century and included a 1969 Tony nomination for Hadrian VII, died Tuesday in New York. The veteran Chicago actor, best known to TV audiences as Paul Reiser’s father on NBC’s Mad About You, was 93. Known for his gravelly voice…

EXCLUSIVE: Paramount has set Dan Hernandez and Benji Samit to write The Villas. The project, produced by Atlas Entertainment, is loosely inspired by Neil Simon’s play and 1971 film Plaza Suite. Similarly, the film revolves around several relationship stories all taking place in a hotel, but this time, the location is…

UPDATED, March 31: Broadway will dim its lights for one minute on Wednesday, April 1 at 7:45 P.M., in memory of Gene Saks, the film and Broadway director who died on Saturday at 93. UPDATED, Sunday noon with more information throughout. Gene Saks, an actor-turned-director whose long kinship with Neil Simon led to the…

UPDATES with a few more quotes, below. Mike Nichols, one of the funniest wiseacres ever to walk the planet, never planned to write an autobiography. So a few months ago he agreed to be interviewed—in a Broadway theater, of course, and before an invited audience—by fellow director Jack O’Brien. It was for an HBO…

As protests go, it was small beer, but on Saturday a minor picket-packing horde had arranged itself peaceably outside the Cafe Edison, better known as the Polish Tea Room, on West 47th Street. The people had come to voice their displeasure over the imminent shuttering of one of Broadway’s most cherished hangouts. “Don…

It seemed like a great idea at the time, which was 1984, right in the heart of the Age of Second-Wave Feminism: Recast the greatest guy-comedy of all time, Neil Simon‘s The Odd Couple, not only with a female Oscar and Felix, but with their hard-drinking, crotch-scratching, stogie-smoking, moldy-sandwich-scarfing…