Paul Reubens, actor who as Pee-Wee Herman became America’s most popular children’s entertainer – obituary

Paul Reubens, who has died aged 70, submerged his identity into Pee-Wee Herman, a nine-year-old boy with a bratty, high-pitched voice whose Pee-Wee’s Playhouse became a must-watch Saturday-morning phenomena for American children and parents alike; Herman, a Mr Bean-like character though with primary colours, sauntered and skipped his way through a surreal series of episodes with an incessant laugh reminiscent of a nervous hiccup.

Everything in Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, which ran from 1986 to 1990, had its own voice, from the meat and vegetables cavorting in the refrigerator to Pee-Wee’s chair, known as Chairy, his globe (Globey) and even the floor (Floory). To quote the show’s theme song, the viewer had landed in a surrealist “place where anything can happen”. Thus, Conky the robot could salivate over a robot-nudie magazine, while Pee-Wee himself loved a fruit salad so much that they were married in a glamorous ceremony.

The first film, Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure (1985), Tim Burton’s directing debut, was a delightful shaggy-dog road movie in which our bratty hero undertakes a wild-goose chase from California to Texas in search of his missing bicycle. Along the way he experiences close encounters with dinosaurs, Hells Angels and a ghostly female truck driver named Large Marge. The climax comes when he mounts the bar of a greasy-biker dive in white platform shoes and breaks into a herky-jerky chicken dance.

In the inevitable sequel, Big Top Pee-Wee (1988), with a supporting cast that included Kris Kristofferson, Herman keeps a strangely anthropomorphic farm, with talking animals and outsized vegetables. There he plays host to a broken-down circus, itself a ménage of oddities including the owner’s pocket-sized wife.

To the untrained eye, Pee-Wee Herman looked like a creepy puppet that had lost its strings. He was beanpole-thin with arms and legs that jiggled around inside an ill-fitting chequered suit, as if inspired by the classic silent clowns. He wore face powder, rouge and shiny red lipstick, while above the red bow tie was an androgynous face reminiscent of a ventriloquist’s dummy, topped off by black, crew-cut hair and a tiny quiff.

Reubens insisted on giving interviews in character, though one inquisitor found only “a hyperactive, giggly child with an adenoidal voice who would find it difficult to sit through his own feature film, let alone an interview”. And while he claimed not to have made a cent from his first film, he made up for it with aggressive merchandising such as Pee-Wee dolls and Pee-Wee Chow breakfast cereal.

There was even talk of Pee-Wee amusement parks in America and in Europe, where he was big in France. “I’d like to have the money,” he explained. “I don’t have another job besides this, so I have to make a living.”

Prised from his nasal twang and infantile preoccupations, Reubens was altogether different, a serious, neurotic and introspective man surrounded by cigarettes, pills and vitamins. He was acutely aware of his responsibility as America’s most popular children’s entertainer. “I feel like I have to walk a tightrope with the children’s show because I want older people to appreciate it too,” he told The Guardian. “But it’s foremost a kids’ show, so I have to be very cautious about what I’m encouraging kids to do.”

Despite such apparent self-awareness, his career came crashing down in 1991 when he was arrested for “manipulating the genitalia” in the back row of a pornographic cinema in Sarasota, Florida. The media seized on his mugshot, which showed him with stringy hair, patchy goatee and wearing a white gym shirt. Yet New York video stores experienced a run on the three X-rated films that had been playing at the cinema: Nurse Nancy, Turn up the Heat and Catalina Five-O: Tiger Shark.

Disney suspended a video in which his character appeared, Toys “R” Us removed Pee-Wee games from its shelves and CBS cancelled repeats of his shows. Rubens denied the charges but to avoid a trial pleaded no contest, pitifully telling television news: “I believe in happy endings. I want Pee-Wee to get his bicycle back.”

He was born Paul Rubenfeld into a Jewish family in Peekskill, New York, on August 27 1952, the eldest of three children of Milton Rubenfeld, one of the five founding pilots of the Israeli air force who later owned a lamp store in Peekskill, and his wife Judy (née Rosen), a teacher.

Much of his early childhood was spent in Oneonta, in upstate New York, where he often visited the Barnum & Bailey Circus. It wintered in Sarasota, Florida, and it was there that the Rubenfelds moved in 1961. Countless hours were spent among lion tamers, high-wire artists and human cannonballs, while his own toys were treated with the greatest of reverence, never being left face down when unattended.

He attended Sarasota High School, took part in summer theatrical schools around the country and studied at Boston University. He was accepted at the California Institute of the Arts, paying his way by working in restaurants and as a salesman for Fuller Brush. Around this time he shortened his name to Reubens.

Until his mid-twenties he was just another struggling actor. He did stand-up and improv work with the Groundlings, a Los Angeles troupe, and claimed to have once been close to being hired for Saturday Night Live. “It suddenly dawned on me that I could conceivably go directly from up-and-coming to has-been without ever having had the success in between,” he told the Evening Standard.

The Pee-Wee Herman character emerged during Groundlings’ workshops. The name Pee-Wee came from a one-inch Pee-Wee harmonica, and Herman from an energetic childhood friend.

After several late-night stage shows and a TV special he started to appear on chat shows, making mincemeat of David Letterman. “I didn’t have jokes, and I wasn’t good at improvising,” Rubens told The New York Times. Instead, he plucked toys from bags and engaged them in conversation. He quickly morphed into a cult figure that gripped America. The next thing he knew he was making a film and had a regular Saturday television series.

In Britain some commentators fell victim to Herman’s ingenious charm, while others found his character’s humour all too resistible. “Pee-Wee Herman’s creation is the kind of man most children are told not to talk to,” harrumphed the Evening Standard film critic Alexander Walker.

Although Herman struggled to survive Reubens’s fall from grace, neither was he entirely frozen out. At the MTV awards in August 1991 he emerged on stage in character, receiving a standing ovation when he asked the audience: “Heard any good jokes lately?” His rehabilitation continued with cameos in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Danny DeVito’s Matilda (1996).

He eventually found a major role playing a gay, cocaine-dealing hairdresser with Penelope Cruz and Johnny Depp in Ted Demme’s Blow (2001). Many years later, he returned as Pee-Wee Herman to entertain a new generation of children and adults in Pee-Wee’s Big Holiday (2016), directed for Netflix by Judd Apatow, his infantile looks seemingly untroubled by the ravages of time thanks to computer technology.

Rubens, who lived in the Hollywood Hills with two cats, deer and squirrels, and surrounded by an elaborate cactus garden, was arrested again in 2002 on suspicion of possessing child pornography, but the charges, stemming from his vast collection of vintage erotica, were whittled down to one of obscenity. He kept his cancer treatment secret for six years. Similarly, he never revealed his romantic life.

Paul Reubens, born August 27 1952, died July 30 2023