Joseph Stein's career spanned six decades. ( Bryan Bedder/Getty)Playwright Joseph Stein, who turned a Yiddish short story into the classic Broadway musical Fiddler on the Roof and later wrote the screenplay for its successful movie adaptation, has died at age 98.

His wife, Elisa Stein, said he died at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan on Sunday from complications of a fall. He had been hospitalized for treatment of prostate cancer, his relatives said.

"He was, I think, the most ebullient, optimistic and happy man I've ever known," said a son, Harry Stein, reached by phone on Monday. "He was constantly good humoured, even in difficult times."

Stein, who won a Tony Award for his work on Fiddler, also supplied the book, or story, for nearly a dozen other musicals, including Zorba, Mr. Wonderful and Plain and Fancy. He also wrote for radio and for television during its early golden age, working for such performers as Henry Morgan, Sid Caesar and Phil Silvers.

But it was Fiddler, based on Sholom Aleichem's Tevye and His Daughters, that proved to be his biggest hit. Featuring a score by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick and direction and choreography by Jerome Robbins, the show opened on Broadway in September 1964 and ran for more than 3,200 performances.

It starred Zero Mostel as Tevye, the Jewish milkman forced to deal with a changing world in early 20th-century Russia.

Fiddler has had several Broadway revivals, the last in 2004 in a production that featured Alfred Molina as Tevye. Topol starred In the 1971 film version, directed by Canada's Norman Jewison.

Stein's theatre career was remarkable for its longevity, some six decades. He started in 1948, when he and writing partner Will Glickman contributed sketches to the revue Lend an Ear, featuring a young Carol Channing, and was still working 60 years later.

After Lend an Ear, Stein and Glickman wrote the short-lived comedy Mrs. Gibbons' Boys (1949).

The two had their first big success with the book for Plain and Fancy (1955), a charming musical that found worldly wise New Yorkers confronting life in a Pennsylvania Amish community. That was followed by Mr. Wonderful (1956), the musical that introduced to Broadway Sammy Davis Jr., playing a nightclub performer vaguely similar to Davis himself.

Other popular works included Take Me Along (1959), a musical version of Eugene O'Neill's Ah, Wilderness! starring Jackie Gleason and Walter Pidegon and Zorba, adapted from the Anthony Quinn movie Zorba the Greek, first seen on Broadway in 1968 with Herschel Bernardi in the title role and later (1983) in an even more popular revival starring Quinn.