News from June 2005 through November 2010. He also reviewed theater for The Westchester Guardian. 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. 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 Manhattan with his wife, Patricia Hoag-Simon, whom he had married in 1992. Work 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. 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. ... In fact, Simon was no more negative than most critics, but his lively writing style meant that his gibes were more memorable than those of the others. 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." But positive reviews tend to be taken for granted, while negative ones are seen as personal insults. (I regularly get angry letters and e-mails of complaint from actors and theatre companies, but no one has ever thanked me for a favorable notice.) Theatrical producers in particular become enraged when reviews do not sound like one of their press releases. They finally seemed to have prevailed. While some people loved Simon's reviews in New York magazine and others hated them, Simon suggested that many were quick to change positions, depending on what he thought of their latest work. Interviewed by Davi Napoleon for The Paris Review, Simon described a photo taken with producer Joseph Papp who had "his arm around me after I've given him a