Neil Simon Biography

Neil Simon was an American playwright and screenwriter. He hasdwritten around thirty plays and same number of movie scripts that have been mainly adapted from his stage writing. He was the writer with most number of Academy Award and Tony Award nominations. Simon started out by writing for television and wrote for successful TV shows like, ‘The Phil Slivers Show’ and ‘Your Shows of Shows’ - his writing received acknowledgement through Emmy Awards. This initial success encouraged him to write his own creative piece and after working on it for three years, he came out with his successful Broadway ‘Come Blow your Horn’ in the early 1960s. There was no looking back for him after it and he wrote more plays and screen scripts. His writing career was so booming that one season he had four successful plays showing on Broadway at the same time and he became the only living playwright who has a theatre named after him - Neil Simon Theatre in New York. Simon’s work ranges from romantic comedy to farce to more serious dramatic comedy. He touched topics like marital conflict, infidelity, sibling rivalry, adolescence, fear of aging, etc. with his writing. Most of his inspiration comes from the source of his unhappy and tormenting childhood, where he faced poverty and volatile marriage of his parents. Writing for him was always a source of emotional stability, a technique he imbibed as a child when he used to take solace in the comedy movies of Charlie Chaplin.