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

Paul Reubens, the comic actor whose childlike alter-ego Pee-wee Herman became a movie and television sensation in the 1980s, died on Sunday in Los Angeles. He was 70.

His death, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, was confirmed on Monday by his longtime representative Kelly Bush Novak, who said 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 said in a statement released with the announcement of his death, 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. Reubens had scores of acting credits in a career that began in the 1960s, including roles on “Murphy Brown,” “The Blacklist” and many other television series and in movies like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (1992), “Batman Returns” (1992) and “Blow” (2001).

But Pee-wee, a character he created in the late 1970s as a 10-minute bit when he was a member of the Los Angeles comedy troupe the Groundlings, overshadowed all else, morphing into a bizarre and savvy cultural phenomenon, a character aimed (at least in its TV incarnation) at children but tapping into adult sensibilities and ambiguities.

After being disappointed after auditioning unsuccessfully for the “Saturday Night Live” cast 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 at the Groundlings Theater in Los Angeles. A national tour followed, and in 1981 HBO broadcast a version of it as a comedy special.

Pee-wee started turning up on late-night talk shows, especially “Late Night With David Letterman,” where the juxtaposition of the idiosyncratic Pee-wee and the laid-back, somewhat befuddled Mr. Letterman was comedy gold.

Then, in 1986, came “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” a children-friendly version of the world according to Pee-wee that aired on CBS for five years and carved out an enduring place in the memories of 1980s children and, often, their parents.

“Pee-wee’s Playhouse” stands as one of the oddest, most audacious, most unclassifiable shows in television history. The androgynous Pee-wee and a vast collection of human and nonhuman characters — there was, for instance, Chairry, a talking armchair that gave hugs — held forth in each episode about, well, it’s hard to summarize. There was a word of the day. There were bizarre toys. In one episode, Pee-wee married a fruit salad.

The show arrived in the midst of Ronald Reagan’s presidential administration and harked back to another button-down era, the one Mr. Reubens lived as a child: the 1950s.

‘‘I saw it as very Norman Rockwell,” he told The New York Times in 2016, ‘‘but it was my Norman Rockwell version of the ’50s, which was more all-inclusive.”

Laurence Fishburne, S. Epatha Merkerson and other actors of color were in the cast. Gilbert Lewis, who was Black, was the King of Cartoons.

“Not just anybody — the king!” Mr. Reubens said. “That came out of growing up in Florida under segregation. I felt really good about that.”

The show was a world away from standard educational TV for children, its lessons — if any — delivered through wackiness rather than didactically, and its presentation decidedly nonlinear.

“I never set out to do a big educational show,” Mr. Reubens told Newsday in 1989. “We’re trying to expose children to as much creativity as we can muster in a half-hour, to be entertaining and to transmit some subliminal messages like nonconformity isn’t bad.”

The show had not been on long before academics and cultural critics were analyzing it and its appeal with weighty papers and other commentaries, but Mr. Reubens was having none of that.

“I’ve been almost paranoid about dissecting it too much because the character always has been a kind of instinctual gut thing. I’m able to turn it on and it just kind of flows. I do what I want and hope it connects.”

The wheels came off in July 1991, when Mr. Reubens was arrested on a charge of indecent exposure in an adult movie theater in Sarasota, Fla., where he had grown up. The arrest led to a small fine, but the headlines damaged his reputation.

“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 told 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 follow.

Jesus Jiménez contributed reporting.