Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist who also wrote occasionally for the stage and screen, including Mike Nichols’ film “Carnal Knowledge” and Robert Altman’s “Popeye,” died on Jan. 17 at his home in upstate New York. He was 95. Feiffer’s wife confirmed to the Washington Post that he died of congestive heart failure.
Feiffer was a cartoonist with the Village Voice for more than 40 years until 1997.
His first connection with the film business came with the Oscar-winning 1961 animated short “Munro,” based on Feiffer’s story — a parable about the mindless military mentality in which the title character, a 4-year-old, is drafted.
Feiffer adapted his own play “Little Murders,” a dark satire about life in New York that had been briefly staged on Broadway in 1967, for the 1971 film of that name directed by Alan Arkin and starring Elliott Gould. Roger Ebert gave the movie four out of four stars and said, “It’s a movie about people driven to insanity and desperate acts of violence by the simple experience of living in a large American city.” It was probably too dark for a mainstream audience.
Far more successful was the other film whose screenplay was credited to Feiffer that year: “Carnal Knowledge,” starring Jack Nicholson, Art Garfunkel and Ann-Margret. The film followed the disastrous sexual lives of the Nicholson and Garfunkel characters from their days at Amherst College in the 1940s until middle age in the 1970s.
The New York Times said, “In addition to being the toughest comedy since ‘Little Murders,’ and the most imaginative comedy since ‘Catch-22,’ ‘Carnal Knowledge’ represents a nearly ideal collaboration of directorial and writing talents.”
Though when Feiffer sent his play “Carnal Knowledge” to Mike Nichols, the director thought it would work better as a film, which he went on to make, a slightly revised version of the original play eventually made it to the stage, at Houston’s Stages Repertory Theater and then at the Pasadena Playhouse, in 1988.
Feiffer was among those who contributed sketches to the infamous but long-running nude and sexually explicit musical “Oh! Calcutta!,” which was also adapted into a film in 1972; other contributors included Robert Benton, Sam Shepard and John Lennon.
After Paramount lost the bidding war to make an “Annie” feature adaptation, the studio cast about for another comicbook property that could be transformed into a bigscreen musical comedy and hit upon “Popeye.” Feiffer, a cartoonist who had also written screenplays and thus seemed like an ideal to write the script, was commissioned to do so.
The final 1980 film, directed by Robert Altman and starring Robin Williams and Shelley Duvall, performed decently at the box office but was not a blockbuster and was perceived as a flop; critically it was a middling success.
Calling ”Popeye” a “thoroughly charming, immensely appealing mess of a movie, often high-spirited and witty, occasionally pretentious and flat, sometimes robustly funny and frequently unintelligible,” the New York Times said, “Jules Feiffer, master of paradox, irony and unannounced understatement, wrote the screenplay, which is so bright and low-keyed that one of its best laughs is a reference to a ”faulty flower,” that is, to a flower with an even number of petals so that a game of ”she loves me, she loves me not” comes out wrong.”
Despite the at-best mixed success of “Popeye,” the film ushered in a period in which Feiffer made a number of contributions to Hollywood. Showtime aired the telepic “”Jules Feiffer’s Hold Me,” starring Katherine Chalfant and Paul Dooley, in 1981; he penned both episodes of the sketch and cabaret series “Comedy Zone” in 1984 and the “Puss in Boots” episode of Shelley Duvall’s “Faerie Tale Theatre” in 1985, a year in which he also co-penned the HBO telepic “Day to Day Affairs,” starring James Coco and Geena Davis, among others.
Feiffer penned French director Alain Resnais’ 1989 film “I Want to Go Home,” about an American cartoonist in Paris played by Adolph Green. Feiffer won he Venice Film Festival’s Golden Osella for best screenplay, but Variety said that Feiffer and Resnais made strange bedfellows — “The product of their union is this stillborn satiric comedy.”
In 1991 the cartoonist contributed to a brief animated series called “The Nudnik Show.”
The signature figure from Feiffer’s comicstrips — a dancer — was brought to life in 2011 in the form of short animated films directed by Judy Dennis based on some of his strips; the work was collectively known as “The Dancer Films.”
Born in the Bronx, Jules Ralph Feiffer took a very serious, professional-minded approach to cartooning from an early age, carefully studying the comicstrips in whatever newspapers his father brought home. He began as an assistant to Will Eisner, author of “The Spirit,” when he was 16.
Feiffer’s short story “Passionella” served as the basis for the third act of “The Apple Tree,” a successful evening of musical playlets that was staged on Broadway in 1966-67; it was revived on the Rialto in 2006. His play “Knock Knock” was mounted on Broadway in 1976 in a production that starred Judd Hirsch, among others.
His play “Grown Ups” hit Broadway in 1981-82 in a production directed by John Madden and starring Bob Dishy, Harold Gould and Frances Sternhagen, among others, and appeared on PBS’ “Great Performances” in a production directed by Madden and starring Martin Balsam, Jean Stapleton, Charles Grodin and Marilu Henner in 1985.
Feiffer was recognized by the Writers Guild of America on multiple occasions. He drew WGA Award nominations for “Little Murders” and “Carnal Knowledge,” both in 1972; received the guild’s Ian McLellan Hunter Award for lifetime achievement in 2004; and won its Animation Writers Caucus Animation Award in 2007.
In recent years he had published a successful graphic novel, “Kill My Mother,” about which the New York Times was greatly enthused, and in 2014 he published his latest children’s book.
Feiffer taught at Yale University, then late in life worked as an instructor with the MFA program at the State University of New York Stony Brook campus in Southampton. Starting in the late ’90s he taught a class called “Humor and Truth,” and in 2014 he started teaching a class on the graphic novel.
His autobiography “Backing Into Forward: A Memoir” was published in 2010.
Feiffer was married twice, the first time to Judith Sheftel from 1961-83, the second time to Jennifer Allen for three decades beginning in 1983. Both marriages ended in divorce.
He is survived by one child by Sheftel and two from Allen.