comedies to revivals of classics such as Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. In Hollywood, he won plaudits for a revered film about nonconformity, 1967’s The Graduate, as well as slick commercial movies like 1988’s Working Girl. Nichols said he thrived on the sense of danger he felt whenever he threw himself into a new project, likening the experience to trying to control a car during an icy skid. “If you’re still here when you come out of the spin, it’s a relief,” he said. “But you’ve got to have the terror if you’re going to do anything worthwhile.”
The son of a Russian-Jewish doctor, Nichols was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin, said the Los Angeles Times. Just months before the outbreak of World War II, his family fled Germany for New York City. Nichols struggled to make friends in his new home: Other children mocked his bald head, the result of a rare reaction to a whooping cough vaccine. In 1950, he entered the University of Chicago to study psychiatry and befriended an equally neurotic student, Elaine May, who shared his love of theater.The pair joined an improvisational theater group and created comedy sketches that “deftly ridiculed the neuroses and pretensions of American life.” In 1960, they took their satirical show, An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May, to Broadway, where it ran for more than 300 performances.
Constantly bickering, the duo split in 1961, with Nichols “finding almost immediate success as a director of Broadway comedies,” said The Washington Post. He won Tonys for his staging of Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple and in 1966 directed Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in an Oscar-winning adaptation of Edward Albee’s play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The following year, Nichols directed The Graduate, “one of the most influential films of its time,” said The Daily Telegraph (U.K.). Starring a then-unknown Dustin Hoffman as a college graduate who has an affair with an older married woman, the movie “cheerfully broke taboos on the depiction of screen sex” and earned Nichols a best-director Oscar.
His glowing reputation in Hollywood didn’t last long, said The Guardian. Nichols’s third movie, an adaptation of Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, “failed both commercially and critically,” and more flops followed. While he continued winning awards on Broadway, it wasn’t until he married his fourth wife, ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer, in 1988 that he returned to form in Hollywood. His late successes included directing Meryl Streep in the 1990 drama Postcards From the Edge and Tom Hanks in the 2007 political comedy Charlie Wilson’s War. Unlike his contemporaries Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese, “Nichols was never known as an auteur,” said The New York Times. He acknowledged that other directors were cinematic artists but said his job was to “make entertainment.
And that’s an absolutely honorable profession.”
