good review, and [asked] for the picture back the next month because of a bad review." Lynn Redgrave and John Clark were particularly happy with his review of Shakespeare for My Father, then about to debut on Broadway. Others have suggested that his negative criticism was mean-spirited, not constructive. 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. It zigzags across our horizon like a bolt of fleshy lightning", while Kathleen Turner is a "braying mantis". 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. They can't help how they look, any more than John Simon can help looking like a rat." 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. 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!" Simon has been identified as the inspiration for the title character of the acerbic and tormented culture critic in Wilfrid Sheed's novel Max Jamison, and Simon expressed his displeasure whenever Sheed's book was reviewed without mentioning Simon's name. 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