A grim July period for pop culture that began with the death of an iconoclastic but troubled singer, Sinéad O’Connor, came to a sad close Monday with the news that the actor and comedian whose character Pee-wee Herman became an American cultural phenomenon, Paul Reubens, has died. 

Reubens was 70. He had battled cancer for six years but never made that struggle public, his publicist said in a statement.

“Please accept my apology for not going public with what I’ve been facing the last six years,” Reubens said in a statement released Monday with the announcement of his death. “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.”

The character with his too-tight gray suit, white chunky loafers, and red bow tie was best known for a film, “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” and a television series, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse.”

The Pee-wee character would become a cultural constant for much of the 1980s, though an indecent exposure arrest in 1991 would send the actor into entertainment exile for years.

Reubens created Pee-wee when he was part of a Los Angeles improv group, The Groundlings, in the late 1970s. The live “Pee-wee Herman Show” had its debut at a Los Angeles theater in 1981 and was a success with both children during matinees and adults at a midnight show.

The show closely resembled the format the Saturday morning TV series “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” would follow years later, with Herman living in a wild and wacky home with a series of stock-character visitors, including one, Captain Karl, played by a late “Saturday Night Live” star, Phil Hartman. In the plot, Pee-wee secretly wishes to fly. HBO would air the show as a special.

“Pee Wee got his wish to fly,” actor Steve Martin tweeted after his death. “Thanks Paul Reubens for the brilliant off the wall comedy.”

Reubens took Pee-wee to the big screen in 1985’s “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure.” The film, in which the character’s cherished bike is stolen, was said to be loosely based on Vittorio De Sica’s Italian Neorealist classic, “The Bicycle Thief.” The film, directed by Tim Burton and co-written by Hartman, sent Pee-wee on a nationwide escapade. 

The movie was a success, grossing $40 million, and spawned a cult following for its oddball whimsy and eclectic cast of characters, from Pee-wee’s little dog to Speck to the indelible “Large Marge.”

A sequel followed three years later in the less well-received “Big Top Pee-wee,” in which Pee-wee seeks to join a circus. Reubens’s character wouldn’t get another movie starring role until 2016’s “Pee-wee’s Big Holiday,” for Netflix. Judd Apatow produced Pee-wee’s big-screen revival.

His television series, “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” ran for five seasons, earned 22 Emmys, and attracted not only children but adults to Saturday-morning TV.

Both silly and subversive and championing nonconformity, the Pee-wee universe was a trippy place, populated by things like a talking armchair and a friendly pterodactyl. The host, who is fond of secret words and loves fruit salad so much he once married it, is prone to lines like, “I know you are, but what am I?” and “Why don’t you take a picture; it’ll last longer?” The act was a hit because it worked on multiple levels, even though Reubens insists that wasn’t the plan.

“It’s for kids,” Reubens told the Associated Press in 2010. “People have tried to get me for years to go, ‘It wasn’t really for kids, right?’ Even the original show was for kids. I always censored myself to have it be kid-friendly.

“The whole thing has been just a gut feeling from the beginning,” Reubens told the AP. “Much as people want me to dissect it and explain it, I can’t. One, I don’t know, and two, I don’t want to know, and three, I feel like I’ll hex myself if I know.”

A talk show host, Jimmy Kimmel, posted on Instagram: “Paul Reubens was like no one else — a brilliant and original comedian who made kids and their parents laugh at the same time.”

Reubens’s career was derailed after he was arrested for indecent exposure in an adult movie theater at Sarasota, Florida, where he grew up, in 1991. He was handed a small fine, but the damage to the character was incalculable.

He said he got plenty of offers to work but told the AP that most of them wanted to take “advantage of the luridness of my situation,” and he didn’t want to do so.

“It just changed,” he said. “Everything changed.”

Still, wherever Rubens turned up, his idiosyncratic sense of humor never failed him.

Born Paul Rubenfield at Peekskill, New York, Reubens, the eldest of three children, grew up primarily at Sarasota before going to Boston University and the California Institute of the Arts.