PAUL REUBENS
(27 August 1952 - 30 July 2023)
The American actor and comedian Paul Reubens has died from cancer at the age of 70. He will always be remembered for being Pee-wee Herman, a stage character he invented in 1981. The Pee-wee Herman Show in Los Angeles ran for all of six months, the eponymous character being a weirdo who looked and sounded odd, almost cartoon-like. With his expressive pale face, grey suit and red bow tie, he resembled Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean. Both were peculiar looking, had a weird voice and did silly things which, strangely, appealed not only to children but to adults too. He was an endearing misfit that audiences took to their hearts.
Paul Rubenfeld was born in Peeskill, New York, to Milton Rubenfeld, a former Air Force pilot and businessman, and his wife Judy, a teacher. The family moved to Sarasota in Florida where as a child Paul was besotted by the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus who had their winter HQ in Florida. Inspired by the I Love Lucy TV show, Paul decided to be a funny man and at five he wrote plays for his siblings to perform on a home-built stage. After leaving Sarasota High School, he attended both Plymouth State University and Boston University and later the California Institute of the Arts. On moving to California, he worked in restaurants and was a brush salesman. In the 1970s he played local comedy clubs and appeared on the TV Gong Show before joining an improv comedy team called The Groundlings.
In his first film, The Blues Brothers (1980), he played a waiter. He also featured in two Cheech & Chong comedies, always appearing as Pee-wee and never going off character. Pee-wee Herman was born during Reubens’ time with The Groundlings in 1978 and he carried on playing the character on TV in many shows, including Late Night with Letterman, Mork & Mindy, Sesame Street and Ally McBeal, as well as on his own TV shows. He finally made Saturday Night Live and featured in voice roles for video games.
Other films for Pee-wee include Pee-wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Tim Burton’s first feature in which Pee-wee goes in search of his lost bicycle. Even with mixed reviews the film grossed nearly $50 million and led to the kids’ TV show Pee-wee’s Playhouse although adults loved it too and it ran for four years. A second film, Big Top Pee-wee, did not do well. As Paul Reubens he had parts in Batman Returns, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Dunston Checks In and Danny DeVito’s Matilda, and he voiced Raccoon in Dr Dolittle and Jokey Smurf in The Smurfs and The Smurfs 2.
Reubens survived two scandals involving indecent exposure and child pornography. He returned to the stage in 2009 with The Pee-wee Herman Show in Hollywood and New York, with $3 million in advance. A new film, Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, which he also wrote and produced, was a Netflix hit. When Reubens died he left a message that said he had “loved you all so much and enjoyed making art for you.”
MICHAEL DARVELL