John Simon (critic)

Simon died at Westchester Medical Center on November 24, 2019, at age 94, from complications of a stroke he suffered earlier that day while attending a dinner theater. At the time of his death, he lived in Mount Vernon, NY with his wife, Patricia Hoag-Simon, whom he had married in 1992.

In December 2015, when Simon was 90, during the week of the premiere of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, New York made the unusual move of republishing a review of the original 1977 Star Wars film by Simon, who blasted it:

In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker criticized Simon for reviews obsessively focusing on actors’ physical appearances to the detriment of critical acumen. Carol Burnett wrote a letter to Time responding to an attack on Liza Minnelli, whose face Simon had compared to that of a beagle, and she closed with “Could Mr. Simon be suffering from a simple case of heart envy?” Nevertheless, nearly a quarter of a century later, Simon gave an unqualified rave review to Hollywood Arms (2002), an autobiographical play which Burnett had co-written.

The character of Hugh Simon (played by Kenneth Mars) in Peter Bogdanovich’s film What’s Up, Doc? was a parody of John Simon, according to Bogdanovich. He is also known for his criticism of poor American writing, and edited the 1981 collection Paradigms Lost: Reflections on Literacy and Its Decline. He was one of the guests on the PBS special Do You Speak American? In addition, Bryan Garner referred to Simon as a language maven and credited him with improving the quality of American criticism.

Simon played himself in a 1975 television episode of The Odd Couple and as a sort of parody of himself in a short film on Saturday Night Live in 1986.

In 1973, Simon wrote an unfavorable review of the play Nellie Toole and Co., which featured actress Sylvia Miles, whom Simon referred to as “one of New York’s leading party girls and gate-crashers”. In retaliation, Miles dumped a plate of food, mostly steak tartare (not pasta, as had been misreported), onto Simon’s head in the popular New York restaurant O’Neal’s. Actress Carrie Nye once said that she overheard Simon in the lobby of a theater exclaim “Homosexuals in the theater! I can’t wait until AIDS gets all of them!”

Reporting for Playbill, Robert Simonson wrote that Simon’s “stinging reviews – particularly his sometimes vicious appraisals of performers’ physical appearances – have periodically raised calls in the theatre community for his removal.” In 1969, the New York Drama Critics’ Circle voted 10–7 to deny Simon membership, although the following year he was accepted into the group. A 1980 issue of Variety included an ad signed by 300 people decrying Simon’s reviews as racist and vicious.

Simon penned theater, film, music, and book reviews for publications such as New York, Esquire, The Hudson Review, National Review, Opera News, The New Leader, Commonweal, The New Criterion and The New York Times Book Review. He also contributed an occasional essay to The Weekly Standard. Simon was the theater critic at New York for 36 years from October 1968 until May 2005. He wrote theater reviews for Bloomberg News from June 2005 through November 2010. He also reviewed theater for The Westchester Guardian.

By 1944, he was in a United States Army Air Forces basic training camp in Wichita Falls, Texas, and served until 1945. Both of his parents became naturalized United States citizens in 1941. He attended Horace Mann School and earned a BA, MA, and PhD in Comparative Literature at Harvard University. As a student, Simon was hired by playwright Lillian Hellman to prepare a translation of Jean Anouilh’s The Lark, but he was reportedly only paid $50, half of the agreed amount, because, in his own words, he gave her fifty double-spaced pages but she had expected that many pages in single-space.

John Simmon was born in Subotica of Hungarian descent to Joseph and Margaret (née Reves) Simmon. He amended his surname at some point to “Simon”. He said that his middle name “Ivan” was later added by his father to add distinction. He grew up in Belgrade before immigrating to the United States in 1941, aged 16, while on a tourist visa to join his father.

John Ivan Simon (né Simmon; May 12, 1925 − November 24, 2019) was an American author and literary, theater, and film critic. After spending his early years in Belgrade, he moved to the United States, serving in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II and studying at Harvard University. Beginning in the 1950s, he wrote arts criticism for a variety of publications, including a 36-year tenure as theatre critic for New York magazine, and latterly as a blogger.