Born in Brooklyn, New York, Shapiro earned his first screen credit for South Sea Woman in 1953.
His work for Day earned him Oscar nominations for Lover Come Back and That Touch of Mink and a win for Pillow Talk, and Mink won him the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Written American Comedy, which he shared with his partner Nate Monaster.
[4] Additional writing credits include Operation Petticoat, Come September, Bedtime Story, Me, Natalie, For Pete's Sake, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and Carbon Copy.
"Although I find social institutions, manners, customs and prejudices a bit ridiculous, I do not regard them as a satirist", he told an interviewer in 1962.
It was a lot easier for Will Rogers to get a laugh by doing a pun about the Government than it was for Laurel and Hardy to figure out a routine on how to move a piano manually from the basement to the fifth floor.