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Mike Nichols (born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky; November 6, 1931 – November 19, 2014) was an American film and theatre director and comedian. He worked across a range of genres and had an aptitude for getting the best out of actors regardless of their experience.
- Overview
- Early life and stage work
- Early films: Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, and Carnal Knowledge
Mike Nichols (born November 6, 1931, Berlin, Germany—died November 19, 2014, New York, New York, U.S.) American motion-picture, television, and stage director whose productions focus on the absurdities and horrors of modern life as revealed in personal relationships.
(Read Martin Scorsese’s Britannica essay on film preservation.)
At age seven, Nichols emigrated with his family from Germany to the United States, before the outbreak of World War II. He attended the University of Chicago (1950–53), studied acting under Lee Strasberg in New York City, and then returned to Chicago, where, with Elaine May, Shelley Berman, Barbara Harris, and Paul Sills, he formed the comic improvisational group The Compass Players. Nichols and May then traveled nationwide with their social-satire routines, and from 1960 to 1961 they performed on Broadway in An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May. The recording of their show won Nichols and May a Grammy Award for best comedy album of the year.
In 1963 Nichols directed his first Broadway show, the highly praised Neil Simon comedy Barefoot in the Park, for which he won a Tony Award. For his next two stage productions, Luv (1964–67) and Simon’s The Odd Couple (1965–67), Nichols won another Tony.
Britannica Quiz
Oscar-Worthy Movie Trivia
In 1966 Nichols made his film-directing debut with Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), a corrosive adaptation of Edward Albee’s 1962 play about two couples who reveal shocking secrets during the course of an evening. The drama was a sensation upon release, owing to its explicit language and the presence of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as a dysfunctional married couple. A box-office hit, it received an Academy Award nomination for best picture, and Nichols was also Oscar-nominated, as were Taylor (who won for best actress), Burton, George Segal, and Sandy Dennis (who won for best supporting actress); the film also earned seven other Oscar nods.
Nichols’s second film made an even greater impact. The Graduate (1967), based on a novel by Charles Webb, starred a relatively unknown actor named Dustin Hoffman as a recent college graduate who has an affair with an older woman (Anne Bancroft as the seductive Mrs. Robinson) and then finds himself in love with her daughter (Katharine Ross). With its portrayal of malaise and alienation, the film spoke to the youth culture in a way that none had since Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and it became one of the highest-grossing movies of the decade. Nichols won an Academy Award for his direction—a flashy turn that borrowed from several European directors—and the picture, Hoffman, Bancroft, Ross, Robert Surtees’s cinematography, and the screenplay by Buck Henry and Calder Willingham were also Oscar-nominated.
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Throughout his career, Nichols continued to work on Broadway, and in 1968 he won a Tony Award for directing Simon’s Plaza Suite. His next film project was an adaptation of Joseph Heller’s antiwar cult classic, Catch-22. Perhaps expectations for Nichols’s screen version were unrealistically high, but it did not fare well when it was released in 1970, failing to please either fans of the novel or casual moviegoers, who may have been put off by the picture’s surfeit of surrealistic black humour. The eclectic cast included Alan Arkin, Anthony Perkins, Orson Welles, Art Garfunkel, Bob Newhart, Buck Henry (who wrote the screenplay), and Charles Grodin.
Carnal Knowledge (1971), however, won many critics back to Nichols’s side, but it too was controversial for its frank and realistic treatment of sex. The drama presents a trenchant but painfully sad portrait of two former college friends (Jack Nicholson and Garfunkel) as they struggle in various relationships from the 1940s through the sexual revolution of the ’60s. Ann-Margret, Candice Bergen, Carol Kane, and Rita Moreno portrayed the women who try to love them. The film was a success at the box office, and Nicholson’s performance as an emotionally empty, predatory chauvinist helped solidify his stardom.
- Michael Barson
Mike Nichols. Director: The Graduate. He, along with the other members of the "Compass Players" including Elaine May, Paul Sills, Byrne Piven, Joyce Hiller Piven and Edward Asner helped start the famed "Second City Improv" company.
- January 1, 1
- Berlin, Germany
- January 1, 1
- Manhattan, New York City, New York, USA
Feb 9, 2021 · Mike Nichols was everywhere in the second half of the 20th century, from the Chicago comedy scene that he helped shape in the early ’60s, to hit Broadway shows, to movies that shaped the culture ...
Mike Nichols. Director: The Graduate. He, along with the other members of the "Compass Players" including Elaine May, Paul Sills, Byrne Piven, Joyce Hiller Piven and Edward Asner helped start the famed "Second City Improv" company. They used the games taught to them by fellow cast mate, Paul Sills 's mother, Viola Spolin. He later worked in legitimate theater as an actor before entering into a ...
- November 6, 1931
- November 19, 2014
Sep 11, 2015 · Mike Nichols, who died at home in New York last November 19, 13 days past his 83rd birthday, left a crater-size hole in the cultural landscape and in the life of the city he loved.He was that rare ...
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Nov 20, 2014 · The two became a sensation, culminating in their Broadway show, “An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May,” which won a Grammy for best comedy recording in 1961. The two split up soon after, though they reunited in the 1990s, with May writing screenplays for Nichols’ “Primary Colors” and “The Birdcage,” adapted from the French farce “La Cage aux Folles.”
