Mike Nichols

His other honors included three BAFTA Awards, the Lincoln Center Gala Tribute in 1999, the National Medal of Arts in 2001, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2010. His films received a total of 42 Academy Award nominations, and seven wins. Nichols began his career in the 1950s with the comedy improvisational troupe The Compass Players, predecessor of The Second City, in Chicago. He then teamed up with his improv partner, Elaine May, to form the comedy duo Nichols and May. Their live improv act was a hit on Broadway, and each of their three albums was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album; their second album, An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, won the award in 1962. After they disbanded, he began directing plays, and quickly became known for his innovative theatre productions. His Broadway directing debut was Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park in 1963, with Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley. He continued to direct plays on Broadway, including Luv (1964), and The Odd Couple (1965) for each of which he received Tony Awards. He won his sixth Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play with a revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (2012) starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. His final directing credit was the revival of Harold Pinter's Betrayal (2013). Nichols directed and/or produced more than 25 Broadway plays throughout his prolific career. Warner Bros. Invited Nichols to direct his first film, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), followed by The Graduate (1967) for which Nichols won the Academy Award for Best Director. Nichols also directed Catch-22 (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971), The Day of the Dolphin (1973), Silkwood (1983), Working Girl (1988), Postcards from the Edge (1990), Wolf (1994), The Birdcage (1996), Primary Colors (1998), Closer (2004), and Charlie Wilson's War (2007). Nichols additionally directed the HBO television film Wit (2001), and miniseries Angels in America (2003), both of which won him the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie.

• Name — Mike Nichols • Birth Name — Igor Mikhail Peschkowsky • Born — 6 November 1931 • Died — 19 November 2014 • Birthplace — Berlin, Weimar Germany • Place of death — New York City, U.S. • Citizenship — * Germany (until 1935) • Stateless (1935–1944) • U.S. (from 1944) • Education — University of Chicago • Occupation — * Director • producer • comedian • Years Active — 1955–2014 • Children — 3 • Relatives — Rachel Nichols (daughter-in-law) Mike Nichols (born Igor Mikhail 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. He is one of 28 people to have won all four of the major American entertainment awards: Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony (EGOT). His other honors included three BAFTA Awards, the Lincoln Center Gala Tribute in 1999, the National Medal of Arts in 2001, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2003 and the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2010. His films received a total of 42 Academy Award nominations, and seven wins. Nichols began his career in the 1950s with the comedy improvisational troupe The Compass Players, predecessor of The Second City, in Chicago. He then teamed up with his improv partner, Elaine May, to form the comedy duo Nichols and May. Their live improv act was a hit on Broadway, and each of their three albums was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album; their second album, An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, won the award in 1962. After they disbanded, he began directing plays, and quickly became known for his innovative theatre productions. His Broadway directing debut was Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park in 1963, with Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley. He continued to direct plays on Broadway, including Luv (1964), and The Odd Couple (1965) for each of which he received Tony Awards. He won his sixth Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play with a revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (2012) starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. His final directing credit was the revival of Harold Pinter's Betrayal (2013). Nichols directed and/or produced more than 25 Broadway plays throughout his prolific career. Warner Bros. invited Nichols to direct his first film, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), followed by The Graduate (1967) for which Nichols won the Academy Award for Best Director. Nichols also directed Catch-22 (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971), The Day of the Dolphin (1973), Silkwood (1983), Working Girl (1988), Postcards from the Edge (1990), Wolf (1994), The Birdcage (1996), Primary Colors (1998), Closer (2004), and Charlie Wilson's War (2007). Nichols additionally directed the HBO television film Wit (2001), and miniseries Angels in America (2003), both of which won him the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie.

Nichols was born Igor Mikhail Peschkowsky on November 6, 1931, in Berlin, Germany. He was a son of Brigitte Claudia (née Landauer) and Pavel Peschkowsky, a physician. His father was born in Vienna, Austria, to a Russian-Jewish immigrant family. Nichols's father's family had been wealthy and lived in Siberia, leaving after the Russian Revolution, and settling in Germany around 1920. Nichols's mother's family were German Jews. His maternal grandparents were Gustav Landauer, a leading theorist on anarchism, and author Hedwig Lachmann. Around the age of four, Nichols had lost his hair following an allergic reaction to an inoculation for whooping cough; as a result, he wore wigs and false eyebrows throughout his entire adulthood. In April 1939, when the Nazis were arresting Jews in Berlin, seven-year-old Mikhail and his three-year-old brother Robert were sent alone to the United States to join their father, who had fled months earlier. His mother joined the family by escaping through Italy in 1940. The family moved to New York City on April 28, 1939. His father, whose original name was Pavel Nikolaevich Peschkowsky, changed his name to Paul Nichols, Nichols derived from his Russian patronymic. Before Paul Nichols had received his U.S. medical license, he was employed by a union on 42nd Street, X-raying union members. He later had a successful medical practice in Manhattan, enabling the family to live near Central Park. Before he established his practice, he was a union doctor, and part of his job was X-raying union members. They didn't know about shielding X-ray machines, and he died of leukemia at 44. [in 1944] • – Mike Nichols In 1944, Mike Nichols became a naturalized citizen of the United States and attended public elementary school in Manhattan (PS 87). After graduating from the Walden School, a private progressive school on Central Park West, Nichols briefly attended New York University before dropping out. In 1950, he enrolled in the pre-med program at the University of Chicago. He later described this college period as "paradise", recalling how "I never had a friend from the time I came to this country until I got to the University of Chicago." While in Chicago in 1953, Nichols joined the staff of struggling classical music station WFMT, 98.7 FM, as an announcer. Co-owner Rita Jacobs asked Nichols to create a folk music program on Saturday nights, which he named The Midnight Special. He hosted the program for two years before leaving for New York City. Nichols frequently invited musicians to perform live in the studio and eventually created a unique blend of "folk music and farce, showtunes and satire, odds and ends", along with his successor Norm Pellegrini. The program celebrated its 70th anniversary in the same time slot in 2023.

• Illustration — Nichols and May, c. 1960 Nichols first saw Elaine May when she was sitting in the front row while he was playing the lead in a Chicago production of Miss Julie, and they made eye contact. Weeks later he ran into her in a train station where he started a conversation in an assumed accent, pretending to be a spy, and she played along, using another accent. They hit it off immediately, which led to a brief romance. Later in his career, he said "Elaine was very important to me from the moment I saw her." In 1953, Nichols left Chicago for New York City to study method acting under Lee Strasberg, but was unable to find stage work there. He was invited back to join Chicago's Compass Players in 1955, the predecessor to Chicago's Second City, whose members included May, Shelley Berman, Del Close, and Nancy Ponder, directed by Paul Sills. In Chicago, he started doing improvisational routines with May, which eventually led to the formation of the comedy duo Nichols and May in 1958, first performing in New York City. They performed live satirical comedy acts and eventually released three records of their routines, which became best-sellers. They also appeared in nightclubs and were on radio and television. Jack Rollins, who later became Woody Allen's manager and producer, invited them to audition and was most impressed: "Their work was so startling, so new, as fresh as could be. I was stunned by how really good they were, actually as impressed by their acting technique as by their comedy... I thought, My God, these are two people writing hilarious comedy on their feet!" In 1960, Nichols and May opened the Broadway show An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May, directed by Arthur Penn. The LP album of the show won the 1962 Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album. Personal idiosyncrasies and tensions, such as on the unsuccessful A Matter of Position, a play written by May and starring Nichols, eventually drove the duo apart to pursue other projects in 1961. About their sudden breakup, director Arthur Penn said, "They set the standard and then they had to move on," while talk show host Dick Cavett said "they were one of the comic meteors in the sky." Comedy historian Gerald Nachman describes the effect of their break-up on American comedy: Nichols and May are perhaps the most ardently missed of all the satirical comedians of their era. When Nichols and May split up, they left no imitators, no descendants, no blueprints or footprints to follow. No one could touch them. They later reconciled and worked together many times. They appeared together at President Jimmy Carter's inaugural gala, in 1977, and in a 1980 New Haven stage revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Swoosie Kurtz and James Naughton. May scripted Nichols's films The Birdcage (1996) and Primary Colors (1998). In 2010, at the AFI's "Life Achievement Award" ceremony, May gave a humor-filled tribute to Nichols.

• Illustration — Nichols at the National Film Society in 1979 Nichols returned to Broadway to direct Neil Simon's The Prisoner of Second Avenue in 1971. The play won Nichols another Tony Award for Best Director. In 1973, Nichols directed a revival of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya on Broadway starring George C. Scott and with a new translation by himself and Albert Todd. In 1973 Nichols directed the film The Day of the Dolphin starring George C. Scott, based on the French novel Un animal doué de raison (lit. A Sentient Animal) by Robert Merle and adapted by Buck Henry. The film was not successful financially and received mixed reviews from critics. Nichols next directed The Fortune (1975), starring Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson and Stockard Channing. Again, the film was a financial failure and received mostly negative reviews. In 1975, Nichols began filming Bogart Slept Here, an original screenplay by Neil Simon. The film starred Robert De Niro and Simon's wife, Marsha Mason. After one week of filming, displeased with the results, Nichols and the studio fired De Niro and shut the production down. Simon would retool the script two years later as The Goodbye Girl. Nichols would not direct another narrative feature film for eight years. Nichols returned to the stage with two moderately successful productions in 1976; David Rabe's Streamers opened in April and ran for 478 performances. Trevor Griffiths's Comedians ran for 145 performances. In 1976 Nichols also worked as Executive Producer to create the television drama Family for ABC. The series ran until 1980. In 1977, Nichols produced the original Broadway production of the hugely successful musical Annie, which ran for 2,377 performances until 1983. Nichols won the Tony Award for Best Musical. Later in 1977, Nichols directed D.L. Coburn's The Gin Game. The play ran for 517 performances and won a Tony Award for Best Actress for Jessica Tandy. In 1980, Nichols directed the documentary Gilda Live, a filmed performance of comedian Gilda Radner's one-woman show Gilda Radner Live on Broadway. It was released at the same time as the album of the show, both of which were successful. Nichols was then involved with two unsuccessful shows: he produced Billy Bishop Goes to War, which opened in 1980 and closed after only twelve performances, and directed Neil Simon's Fools, in 1981, which closed after forty performances. Returning to Hollywood, Nichols's career rebounded in 1983 with the film Silkwood, starring Meryl Streep, Cher and Kurt Russell, based on the life of whistleblower Karen Silkwood. The film was a financial and critical success, with film critic Vincent Canby calling it "the most serious work Mike Nichols has yet done." The film received five Academy Award nominations, including a Best Director nomination for Nichols. That same year, Nichols and Peter Stone helped to fix up and rewrite the musical My One and Only just days before its Boston premiere. The show eventually went to Broadway and ran for 767 performances, winning Tony Awards for Best Actor, Best Choreography (both for Tommy Tune) and Best Supporting Actor (Charles "Honi" Coles). In 1984, Nichols directed the Broadway premiere of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. The New York Times critic Frank Rich wrote that "The Broadway version of The Real Thing—a substantial revision of the original London production—is not only Mr. Stoppard's most moving play, but also the most bracing play that anyone has written about love and marriage in years." The play was nominated for seven Tony Awards and won five, including a Best Director Tony for Nichols. Nichols followed the success with the Broadway premiere of David Rabe's Hurlyburly, also in 1984. It was performed just two blocks away from the theater showing The Real Thing. It was nominated for three Tony Awards and won Best Actress for Judith Ivey. • Illustration — Whoopi Goldberg credits Nichols with discovering her after seeing her perform her one-woman show in 1983 In 1983, Nichols had seen comedian Whoopi Goldberg's one woman show, The Spook Show, at Dance Theater Workshop and wanted to help her expand it. Goldberg's self-titled Broadway show opened in October 1984 and ran for 156 performances. Rosie O'Donnell later said that Nichols had discovered Goldberg while she was struggling as a downtown artist: "He gave her the entire beginning of her career and recognized her brilliance before anyone else." In 1986 Nichols directed the Broadway premiere of Andrew Bergman's Social Security and in 1988 directed Waiting for Godot, starring Robin Williams and Steve Martin. Williams cited Nichols and May as among his early influences for performing intelligent comedy. In 1986, Nichols directed the film Heartburn, which received mixed reviews, and starred Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson. In 1988, Nichols completed two feature films. The first was an adaptation of Neil Simon's autobiographical stage play Biloxi Blues starring Matthew Broderick, also receiving mixed critical reviews. Nichols directed one of his most successful films, Working Girl, which starred Melanie Griffith, Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver. The film was a huge hit upon its release, and received mostly positive reviews from critics. It was nominated for six Academy Awards (including Best Director for Nichols) and won the Academy Award for Best Song for Carly Simon's "Let the River Run". At one point in the 1980s, Nichols—prone to bouts of depression—reported that he had considered suicide, a feeling apparently brought on by a psychotic episode he experienced after taking the drug Halcion.

In the 1990s, Nichols directed several more successful, well-received films including Postcards from the Edge (1990) starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine; Primary Colors (1998) starring John Travolta and Emma Thompson; and The Birdcage (1996), an American remake of the 1978 French film La Cage aux Folles starring Robin Williams, Nathan Lane, Gene Hackman and Dianne Wiest. Both The Birdcage and Primary Colors were written by Elaine May, Nichols's comedy partner earlier in his career. Other films directed by Nichols include Regarding Henry (1991) starring Harrison Ford and Wolf (1994) starring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer. When he was honored by Lincoln Center in 1999 for his life's work, Elaine May—speaking once again as his friend—served up the essence of Nichols with the following: So he's witty, he's brilliant, he's articulate, he's on time, he's prepared and he writes. But is he perfect? He knows you can't really be liked or loved if you're perfect. You have to have just enough flaws. And he does. Just the right, perfect flaws to be absolutely endearing.

In the 2000s, Nichols directed the films What Planet Are You From? (2000), Closer (2004) and Charlie Wilson's War (2007), a political drama that was ultimately his final feature film. What Planet Are You From? received mixed reviews from critics, while Closer and Charlie Wilson's War received generally positive reviews and were both nominated for Academy Awards, BAFTA and Golden Globe awards. Nichols also directed widely acclaimed adaptations of Wit (2001) and Angels in America (2003) for television, winning Emmy Awards for both of them. For his direction of the Broadway musical Spamalot, he won the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Musical in 2005. • Illustration — Nichols in 2010 In 2012, Nichols won the Best Direction of a Play Tony Award for a revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. In 2013, he directed Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz in a Broadway revival of Harold Pinter's Betrayal. The play began previews of its limited run on October 1, 2013 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, opened on October 27, and closed on January 4, 2014. Among projects that remained uncompleted when he died, in April 2013 it was announced that Nichols was in talks to direct a film adaptation of Jonathan Tropper's novel One Last Thing Before I Go. The film was to be produced by J. J. Abrams, who previously wrote the Nichols-directed film Regarding Henry (1991). In July 2014, it was announced that Nichols and Streep would reunite for an HBO film of Terrence McNally's 1985 play Master Class, with Nichols directing Streep in the starring role of opera singer Maria Callas. Nichols was a contributing blogger at The Huffington Post. He was also a co-founder of The New Actors Workshop in New York City, where he occasionally taught. In addition, he remained active in the Directors Guild of America, interviewing fellow film director Bennett Miller on stage in October 2011 after the Guild's screening of Miller's Moneyball. In January 2016, PBS aired Mike Nichols: American Masters, an American Masters documentary about Nichols directed by his former improv partner, Elaine May. On February 22, 2016, HBO aired the documentary Becoming Mike Nichols.

After his early successes as a stage and film director, Nichols had developed a reputation as an auteur who likes to work intimately with his actors and writers, often using them repeatedly in different films. Writer Peter Applebome noted that "few directors have such a gift for getting performances out of actors." During a half-year period in 1967 he had four hit plays running simultaneously on Broadway, during which time his first Hollywood feature, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, had also become a popular and critical success. Combined with his second film, The Graduate, in 1967, the two films had already earned a total of 20 Oscar nominations, including two for Best Director, and winning it for The Graduate. Nichols was able to get the best out of actors regardless of their acting experience, whether an unknown such as Dustin Hoffman or a major star like Richard Burton. For his first film, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, each of the four actors was nominated for an Oscar, with Elizabeth Taylor and Sandy Dennis winning. Burton later said, "I didn't think I could learn anything about comedy—I'd done all of Shakespeare's. But from him I learned," adding, "He conspires with you to get your best." However, it was Taylor who chose Nichols to be their director, because, writes biographer David Bret, "she particularly admired him because he had done a number of ad-hoc jobs to pay for his education after arriving in America as a seven-year-old Jewish refugee." Producer Ernest Lehman agreed with her choice: "He was the only one who could handle them," he said. "The Burtons were quite intimidating, and we needed a genius like Mike Nichols to combat them." Biographer Kitty Kelley says that neither Taylor nor Burton would ever again reach the heights of acting performance they did in that film. The same style of directing was used for The Graduate, where, notes film historian Peter Biskind, Nichols took Dustin Hoffman, with no movie acting experience, along with Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross and others, and managed to get some of their finest acting on screen. This ability to work closely with actors would remain consistent throughout his career. Hoffman credits Nichols for permitting the realistic acting needed for the satirical roles in that film: It's Nichols's style—he walks that edge of really going as far as he can without falling over the cliff, into disbelief. It's not caricature. That's the highest compliment for satire. In a similar way, Jeremy Irons, who acted in the play The Real Thing, said that Nichols creates a very "protective environment: he makes you feel he's only there for you," while Ann-Margret, for her role in Carnal Knowledge, felt the same: "What's wonderful about Mike is that he makes you feel like you're the one that's come up with the idea, when it's actually his."

Nichols was married four times; the first three ended in divorce, the last upon his death. Nichols's first marriage was to Patricia Scot; they were married from 1957 to 1960. His second was to Margot Callas, a former "muse" of the poet Robert Graves, from 1963 to 1974. The couple had a daughter together. His third marriage, in 1975, to Annabel Davis-Goff, produced two children; it ended in divorce in 1986. His fourth was to former Good Morning America and ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer, whom he married on April 29, 1988. None of his wives were Jewish and his children were not brought up according to a religion, but they identify as Jewish. Nichols had a lifelong interest in Arabian horses. From 1968 to 2004, he owned a farm in Connecticut and was a noted horse breeder. He also imported quality Arabian horses from Janów Podlaski Stud Farm in Poland, some of which sold for record-setting prices. While in high school, Nichols had been an instructor at the Claremont Riding Academy in Manhattan's Upper West Side and also had "ridden in horse shows in Chicago." In 2009, Nichols signed a petition in support of releasing director Roman Polanski, who had been detained while traveling to a film festival in relation to his 1977 sexual abuse charges, which the petition argued would undermine the tradition of film festivals as a place for works to be shown "freely and safely", and that arresting filmmakers traveling to neutral countries could open the door "for actions of which no-one can know the effects."

Directed features • Year — Title — Distribution • 1966 — Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? — Warner Bros. • 1967 — The Graduate — Embassy Pictures • 1970 — Catch-22 — Paramount Pictures • 1971 — Carnal Knowledge — Embassy Pictures • 1973 — The Day of the Dolphin • 1975 — The Fortune — Columbia Pictures • 1980 — Gilda Live — Warner Bros. • 1983 — Silkwood — 20th Century Fox • 1986 — Heartburn — Paramount Pictures • 1988 — Biloxi Blues — Universal Pictures • Working Girl — 20th Century Fox • 1990 — Postcards from the Edge — Columbia Pictures • 1991 — Regarding Henry — Paramount Pictures • 1994 — Wolf — Columbia Pictures • 1996 — The Birdcage — Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer • 1998 — Primary Colors — Universal Pictures • 2000 — What Planet Are You From? — Sony Pictures Releasing • 2004 — Closer • 2007 — Charlie Wilson's War — Universal Pictures

Mike Nichols was recorded at birth as Michael Igor Peschkowsky. The authorities additionally record the heading Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky. His recorded languages were English and German. He was the child of Pavel Nicholaiyevitch Peschkowsky and Brigitte Landauer. He married Patricia Scott, Margot Callas and Diane Sawyer. 3 children are recorded: Daisy Nichols, Max Nichols and Jenny Nichols.

Nichols has directed multiple Oscar winning and nominated performances. • Year — Performer — Film — Result • Academy Award for Best Actor • 1967 — Richard Burton — Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? • 1968 — Dustin Hoffman — The Graduate • Academy Award for Best Actress • 1967 — Elizabeth Taylor — Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? • 1968 — Anne Bancroft — The Graduate • 1984 — Meryl Streep — Silkwood • 1989 — Melanie Griffith — Working Girl • 1991 — Meryl Streep — Postcards from the Edge • Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor • 1967 — George Segal — Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? • 2005 — Clive Owen — Closer • 2008 — Philip Seymour Hoffman — Charlie Wilson's War • Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress • 1967 — Sandy Dennis — Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? • 1968 — Katharine Ross — The Graduate • 1972 — Ann-Margret — Carnal Knowledge • 1984 — Cher — Silkwood • 1989 — Joan Cusack — Working Girl • Sigourney Weaver • 1999 — Kathy Bates — Primary Colors • 2005 — Natalie Portman — Closer