George F. Abbott, who opened on Broadway in 1913 and didn't close for more than 80 years, died on Tuesday at his home in Miami Beach. He was 107. The cause was a stroke, said his wife, Joy. Probably no one in this century brought more verve and excitement to the American stage than the versatile man who was known to the theater world as Mr. Abbott, and to the rest of the world as Mr. Broadway. As a playwright, director, actor, producer and play doctor who could make a faulty script work, George Abbott is virtually synonymous with the history of Broadway: "Jumbo," "Broadway," "Pal Joey," "High Button Shoes," "Where's Charley," "Call Me Madam," "Wonderful Town," "Pajama Game," "On Your Toes," "Damn Yankees," "Fiorello!," "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum." He directed these shows, and he was involved, in one capacity or another, in more than 120 productions on and off Broadway and on the road. In some years, he had three hits running at once. Gilbert Millstein of The New York Times wrote that "on the basis of sheer frightening volume alone, an easily defensible argument can be drummed up that no living individual, or possibly even dead, has contributed more to the Broadway theater in the capacities of actor, director, producer, co-producer, author, co-author and play doctor, than George Abbott." This accolade was written in 1954, when Mr. Abbott still had more than 40 years of work ahead of him. He preferred working with young, unknown actors. "You're always better off if you can do without a star," he once said. "Besides saving money, it saves wear and tear on the nervous system." He confessed to what he called a "Pygmalion complex," and in his desire to mold young careers he gave the first big break to Shirley MacLaine, Jose Ferrer, Shirley Booth, Butterfly McQueen, Jack Gilford, Jean Stapleton, Carol Burnett, Tom Bosley and at least 40 others working for Equity minimum. He also took a chance on many other virtual unknowns: Jerome Robbins, Bob Fosse, Harold Prince, Garson Kanin, Betty Comden, Adolph Green and a stranger to Broadway by the name of Leonard Bernstein. Along the way he won virtually every theatrical award as well as many other honors: He shared the Pulitzer Prize for "Fiorello!" (which also won the Drama Critics Circle Award and two Tony Awards); won Tonys for "Pajama Game" in 1955, "Damn Yankees" in 1956 and "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" in 1963; was given a special Tony for a career of distinguished achievement in the theater, and received the Handel Medallion from New York City and, in 1982, the Kennedy Center Lifetime Achievement Award. Mr. Abbott said he refused to be greatly elated at such honors: "Perhaps it's a defense; if you don't get too emotional when they like you, you will be less likely to get too emotional when they don't." Halfway into his 99th year he telephoned his secretary, Celia Linder, who had worked for him since 1935, to tell her that he was sending her two plays he had written between rounds of golf. In 1989, when he was 102 years old, he was the co-director of one of them, "Frankie," off Off Broadway. When the actress Maureen Stapleton, a friend of his, was told he was still playing golf at that age, she said: "If you told me he had won a swimming contest I wouldn't be surprised. He was full of beans." One day in the late 1980's he was playing golf and fell on the fairway. When he didn't get up, his wife leaned over and started to shake him. "Get up, George, get up," she pleaded. "Don't just lay there." After a moment he opened his eyes. "Lie there," he said. Mrs. Abbott said that a week and a half before his death he was dictating revisions to the second act of "Pajama Game," with a revival in mind. Last year, at a mere 106 years old, he walked down the aisle on opening night of the "Damn Yankees" revival and received a standing ovation. He was heard saying to his companion, "There must be somebody important here." The "Abbott touch" -- which rescued flops and created hits -- was often frenetic. In an Abbott production people didn't stand there, they did something. Doors opened and shut, curtains rose and fell, everything happened quickly. Even offstage his life was an Abbott production. He would come home from the rehearsal of one show to rewrite another, or leave the stage of one musical to cast the next. His energy and optimism were a tribute, perhaps, to the abstemious life he advocated. "With the slightest encouragement," he wrote in his 1963 autobiography, "Mister Abbott," "I will launch forth on a violent argument in favor of health. I do not think burning the candle at both ends casts a lovely light; on the contrary, I am of the opinion that it is a dandy way to get a nervous breakdown. How can anyone enjoy anything in the wide, wide world with a headache or a queasy stomach?" He was an anomaly in the flamboyant world of Broadway and was, by his own admission, a puritanical and exacting escort. He never smoked and barely tolerated it in others. He rarely took a drink, and then it was only wine at dinner. He was careful to eat three square meals a day. His advice to anyone who asked, was: "Have fun. And go home when you're tired." Mr. Abbott -- 6 feet 2 inches tall and ramrod straight, hair slicked back, looking more like a preacher than a producer -- would always appear for rehearsals precisely on time in a brown or gray business suit and tie. He never removed the tie. He was known for saying only what was necessary, not a word more. For Mr. Abbott, the play was everything, and nothing was permitted to get in its way. What Mr. Abbott imparted to a show were taste, artistic judgment and a sense of how much to do or not to do. When he was asked what he brought to the players, he said, "I make them say their final syllables." He reserved his most acid criticism for the Method actor: "He has struggled successfully at such difficult tasks as pretending that he is a tree in full bloom, but he has never learned to say a final 't.'" Once, when an actor asked, "What is my motivation?," Mr. Abbott is said to have replied, "Your job." With actors who had no method at all he would provide painstaking directions. "Walk here, count one-two-three-four, say the line and count seven, kiss the girl and count eight, walk off the stage." If he had one problem throughout his life on Broadway, he said, it was his failure to get people to call him "George." "I don't feel either formal or formidable, but I guess I must be," he wrote in his autobiography. Stanley Prager, one of the stars of "Pajama Game," once said he planned to name his first child after Mr. Abbott: he said he would call him Mr. Abbott Prager. He once told his protege Bobby Griffith to call him George. "I certainly will, Mr. Abbott," Mr. Griffith replied. Although Mr. Abbott made millions in the theater, he was said to be just about the most tightfisted man on Broadway. An actor said Mr. Abbott's idea of a treat was to invite you out to a Child's restaurant, order coffee and then suggest going Dutch. He admitted he was a "tightwad." What he never admitted to were his private charities, and he never mentioned that he was the "angel" who backed shows when no one else would. When Harold Prince, then an underling in the Abbott office, wanted to produce "Pajama Game," he had trouble getting backers because no one connected with the production was well known. Bob Fosse was the choreographer, Richard Adler the composer, and a 20-year-old from Virginia by the name of Shirley MacLaine was one of the dancers. It was Mr. Abbott who finally came through with the money. When Mr. Prager was called before the House Committee on Un-American Activities during the McCarthy era to answer questions about Communist penetration into show business, he was sure he was going to be fired from "Pajama Game." Mr. Abbott came through again, taking that moment to sign him to a long-term contract. George Francis Abbott was born on June 25, 1887, in Forestville, N.Y., the first of three children of George Burwell and May MacLaury Abbott. By his own admission, the young George Abbott was "a frightful liar," always making up stories. It was only later, he said, that he realized "this tendency to fantasy was something which could be used to make money." When he was 11 years old the family moved to Cheyenne, Wyo., where as a Western Union messenger, young George was dispatched to deliver beer to the town's red light district. Later, during summers, he worked on a ranch, and for the rest of his life was fond of reminding people that he was once a real cowboy. Because he was a tall, gangling boy he walked with a stoop so he would look shorter. A lackluster student, he was finally sent to Kearney Military Academy in Nebraska, which, by his own account, cured his poor posture as well as what he called his tendency toward juvenile delinquency. Just after the turn of the century, the family moved back East to Hamburg, N.Y., near Buffalo, which enabled the stage-struck teen-ager to take the trolley car to the theater. After graduating from the University of Rochester, where he played football but was soon drawn to the Dramatic Club, Mr. Abbott enrolled in a playwriting course at Harvard. That year -- 1912 -- Mr. Abbott won a $ 100 prize for his play "The Man in the Manhole." By 1913, Mr. Abbott thought he was ready for Broadway, but he was rebuffed month after month. He finally landed a job as a drunken college youth in "The Misleading Lady," and with a princely salary of $ 45 a week he thought he could finally marry Ednah Levis, the woman he'd been seeing for more than five years. But work was not steady, and it wasn't until two years later, when he was hired by John Golden as a combination office boy, assistant casting director, associate playwright and protege at $ 15 a week, that he began to make a living in New York. The role of Tex, a roistering cowboy in "Zander the Great," was the turning point in his career. He was selected as 1 of the 10 best performers of 1923, and his job-hunting days were over. But he soon became increasingly involved in rewriting scripts and eventually in production. In 1926, "Broadway," which he wrote with Philip Dunning and also directed, became Mr. Abbott's first smash hit. The next year he gave a young actor from the Yiddish theater his first role on the English-speaking stage, in "Four Walls." The actor, Muni Weisenfeld, went on to become Paul Muni. In 1927, the Abbott production of "Coquette" starred an actress whom he called "the weeping wonder of the world." Her name was Helen Hayes. When the talkies arrived, Mr. Abbott was lured to Hollywood, and between 1928 and 1958 worked on 11 movies, including "All Quiet on the Western Front" and the film versions of "Where's Charley," "The Pajama Game" and "Damn Yankees." But he always longed to get back to Broadway. He wrote, "Hollywood is jealous of Broadway because it is better, and Broadway is jealous of Hollywood because it is richer." For more than half a century, beginning in 1920, there was hardly a year in which there was not at least one George Abbott production on Broadway, and sometimes there were as many as five. In 1932, the Ben Hecht-Charles McArthur play "Twentieth Century" began a string of hits, among them "Jumbo" (1935), a circus story with songs by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, book by Hecht and MacArthur, and production by Billy Rose. New stars were made in Mr. Abbott's plays: Shirley Booth and Garson Kanin in "Three Men on a Horse" (1935); Eddie Albert and Jose Ferrer in "Brother Rat" (1936); Desi Arnaz and Van Johnson in "Too Many Girls" (1939); Gene Kelly in "Pal Joey" (1940). In 1938, "What a Life," a comedy about the problems of adolescence directed by Mr. Abbott, brought America a teen-ager who became a staple of radio, Henry Aldrich. George Abbott had one daughter, Judith, who was a casting director. She died in 1984. His first wife died in 1930, and he later recalled that at the age of 43 -- for the first time in his life -- he started collecting telephone numbers. In 1946 he married Mary Sinclair. They were divorced in 1951. In 1983, when he was 96, he married Joy Valderrama, more than 40 years his junior, whom he had met 25 years before when she was working as a Hawaiian dancer in a New Jersey nightclub. During the cold months they lived in Miami, where they frequently played golf. They kept a summer home in Merriewold Park, Forestburgh, N.Y. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a sister, Isabel Juergens; two granddaughters, Amy Clark Davidson and Susan Clark Hansley; a grandson, George Clark, and six great-grandchildren. Mr. Abbott disliked funerals -- he even skipped his mother's and his father's -- and wrote in his autobiography: "I have seen to it that no one must come and be sad when I die. Later on, if some of my friends should talk about me, or remember something funny or interesting that has happened to us, that will be all the obsequies I desire." George Abbott made his protean presence felt in the theater as an actor, writer, producer and director in more than 120 productions on and off Broadway and on the road. Here is a highly selective sampling. The Misleading Lady 1913; Three Wise Fools 1918; Processional; The Fall Guy; A Holy Terror 1925 ;Love 'Em and Leave 'Em; Broadway; Chicago 1926; The Great Magoo; Twentieth Century 1932; Three Men on a Horse; Jumbo; Boy Meets Girl 1935; On Your Toes; Brother Rat 1936; Room Service 1937; All That Glitters; The Boys From Syracuse 1938; Pal Joey 1940; Best Foot Forward 1941; Beat the Band; Sweet Charity 1942; On the Town 1944; Billion Dollar Baby 1945; Beggar's Holiday 1946; Barefoot Boy with Cheek; High Button Shoes 1947; Look Ma, I'm Dancin'; Where's Charley 1948; Call Me Madam 1950; A Tree Grows in Brooklyn 1951; Wonderful Town; Me and Juliet 1953; Pajama Game 1954; Damn Yankees 1955; New Girl in Town 1957; Once Upon a Mattress; Fio rello! 1959; Tenderloin 1960; A Call on Kuprin; Take Her, She's Mine 1961; A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum; Never Too Late 1962; Fade Out -- Fade In 1964; Flora, the Red Menace 1965; How Now, Dow Jones 1967; The Education of Hyman Kaplan 1968; Norman Is That You; Not Now, Darling 1970 Correction: February 3, 1995, Friday An obituary yesterday and in some copies on Wednesday about the director and producer George Abbott misstated the original name of the actor Paul Muni. It was Muni Weisenfreund, not Muni Weisenfeld. An obituary on Thursday and in some copies on Wednesday about the director and producer George Abbott referred incompletely to the creators of the Broadway musical "The Pajama Game." The music and lyrics were written by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, not by Mr. Adler alone.