Paul Reubens, Creator of Pee-wee Herman, Is Dead at 70

Paul Reubens, the comedian actor whose childlike alter-ego Pee-wee Herman turned a film and tv sensation within the Nineteen Eighties, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 70.

His demise, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, was confirmed on Monday by his longtime consultant Kelly Bush Novak, who stated he had “privately fought cancer for years with his trademark tenacity and wit.”

“Please accept my apology for not going public with what I’ve been facing the last six years,” Mr. Reubens stated in a press release launched with the announcement of his demise, The Associated Press reported. “I have always felt a huge amount of love and respect from my friends, fans and supporters. I have loved you all so much and enjoyed making art for you.”

Mr. Herman had scores of appearing credit in a profession that started within the Nineteen Sixties, together with roles on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Murphy Brown,” “The Blacklist” and lots of different tv sequence and in films like “Batman Returns” (1992) and “Blow” (2001).

But Pee-wee, a personality he created within the late Nineteen Seventies as a 10-minute bit when he was a member of the Los Angeles comedy troupe the Groundlings, overshadowed all else, morphing right into a weird and savvy cultural phenomenon, a personality aimed — at the very least in its TV incarnation — at kids however tapping into grownup sensibilities and ambiguities.

After being dissatisfied after auditioning unsuccessfully for the “Saturday Night Live” solid in 1980, Mr. Reubens set about creating “The Pee-wee Herman Show,” which was billed as a “live onstage TV pilot” and had its premiere in early 1981 on the Groundlings Theater in Los Angeles. A nationwide tour adopted, and in 1981, HBO broadcast a model of it as a comedy particular.

Then, in 1986, got here “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” a (principally) children-friendly model that aired on CBS for 5 years.

Mr. Reubens’ profession was set again in 1991, when he was arrested on a cost of indecent publicity in an grownup movie show in Sarasota, Fla., the place he had grown up. The arrest led to a small wonderful, however the headlines broken his repute.

“The moment that I realized my name was going to be said in the same sentence as children and sex, that’s really intense,” he instructed NBC in 2004. “That’s something I knew from that very moment, whatever happens past that point, something’s out there in the air that is really bad.”

A full obituary will comply with.