His controversial writing style, which could include harsh remarks about the physical appearances of performers, led to accusations of bigotry, public rebukes from fellow critics, and confrontations with the artists about whom he wrote.
[10] Simon played himself in a 1975 television episode of The Odd Couple[11] and as a sort of parody of himself in a short film on Saturday Night Live in 1986.
[12] 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.
[5] 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.
On Simon's dismissal from New York magazine, critic Richard Hornby argued in The Hudson Review:His removal seems to have been political, with a new editor-in-chief acceding to the usual pressure from theatrical producers to replace him with someone more positive....
His enthusiasms were expressed with the same vigor—after heaping praise on the writing, acting, directing, and even the set designs of Doubt, for example, he described it as "a theatrical experience it would be sinful to miss."
For example, he was known for dwelling on what he saw as the physical flaws of those actors who displeased him: Wallace Shawn is "unsightly", Barbra Streisand's nose "cleaves the giant screen from east to west, bisects it from north to south.
[16] In his memoir Life Itself, Roger Ebert wrote, "I feel repugnance for the critic John Simon, who made it a specialty to attack the way actors look.
"[17] In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker criticized Simon for being "unrelentingly offensive" towards Black English Vernacular and actresses' faces.
"[19] Nevertheless, nearly a quarter of a century later, Simon gave an unqualified rave review to Hollywood Arms (2002), an autobiographical play that Burnett had co-written.
[16] 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.
Strip Star Wars of its often striking images and its highfalutin scientific jargon, and you get a story, characters, and dialogue of overwhelming banality, without even a "future" cast to them: Human beings, anthropoids, or robots, you could probably find them all, more or less like that, in downtown Los Angeles today.