NICHOLS REMEMBERED FOR DIRECTING BRILLIANCE.
NEW YORK — Mike Nichols, the director of matchless versatility who brought fierce wit, caustic social commentary and wicked absurdity to such film, TV and stage hits as The Graduate, Angels in America and Monty Python’s Spamalot, died on Wednesday. He was 83.
ABC News president James Goldston confirmed his death Thursday, praising Nichols for his “sparkling wit and a brilliant mind.”
During a career spanning more than 50 years, Nichols, who was married to ABC News anchor Diane Sawyer, managed to be both an insider and outsider. An occasional White House guest and friend to countless celebrities, he was as likely to satirize the elite as he was to mingle with them. A former standup performer who began his career in a groundbreaking comedy duo with Elaine May and whose work brought him an Academy Award, a Grammy and multiple Tony and Emmy honours, Nichols had a remarkable gift for mixing edgy humour and dark drama.
“No one was more passionate than Mike,” Goldston said, praising him for his “sparkling wit and a brilliant mind.”
Nichols is one of only a handful of those known as EGOT winners — with Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony awards to their names.
Over his first two decades, Nichols directed about a dozen Broadway hits. Half were plays by Neil Simon, starting with Barefoot in the Park (1963). He won a Tony Award for Death of a Salesman in a 2012 Broadway revival starring Philip Seymour Hoffman.
His 1966 film directing debut Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf ? unforgettably captured the vicious yet sparkling and sly dialogue of Edward Albee’s play, as a couple (Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor) torment each other over deep-seated guilt and resentment.
Angels in America, the 2003 TV miniseries adapted from the stage sensation, blended rich pathos and whimsy in its portrait of people coping with AIDS and looking to the heavens for compassion they found lacking in Ronald Reagan’s 1980s America.
Nichols was a wealthy, educated man who often mocked those just like him, never more memorably than in The Graduate, which shot Dustin Hoffman to fame in the 1967 story of an earnest young man rebelling against his elders’ expectations. Nichols himself would say he identified with Hoffman’s awkward, perpetually flustered Benjamin Braddock.
Mixing farce and Oedipal drama, Nichols managed to capture a generation’s discontent without ever mentioning Vietnam, civil rights or any other issues of the time. But young people laughed hard when a family friend advised Benjamin that the road to success was paved with “plastics” or at Benjamin’s lament that he felt like life was “some kind of game, but the rules don’t make any sense to me. They’re being made up by all the wrong people. I mean no one makes them up. They seem to make themselves up.”
At the time, Nichols was “just trying to make a nice little movie,” he said in 2005 at a retrospective screening. “It wasn’t until when I saw it all put together that I realized this was something remarkable.”
Nichols won the best director Oscar for The Graduate, which co-stars Anne Bancroft as an aging temptress pursuing Hoffman, whose character responds with the celebrated line, “Mrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me.”
Just as he moved easily between stage, screen and television, Nichols fearlessly switched from genre to genre. Onstage, he tackled comedy (The Odd Couple), classics (Uncle Vanya) and musicals (The Apple Tree and Spamalot, the latter winning him his sixth Tony for directing).
On Broadway, he won nine Tonys, for directing the plays Barefoot in the Park (1964), Luv and The Odd Couple (1965), Plaza Suite (1968), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1972), The Real Thing (1984), and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (2012). He has also won in other categories, for directing the musical Monty Python’s Spamalot (2005), and for producing Annie (1977) and The Real Thing (1984).
“I think a director can make a play happen before your eyes so that you are part of it and it is part of you,” he said. “If you can get it right, there’s no mystery. It’s not about mystery. It’s not even mysterious. It’s about our lives.”
Though known for films with a comic edge, Nichols branched into thrillers with Day of the Dolphin, horror with Wolf and real-life drama with Silkwood. Along with directing for television, he was an executive producer for the 1970s TV series Family.
Nichols’ golden touch failed him on occasion with such duds as the antiwar satire Catch-22, with Alan Arkin in an adaptation of Joseph Heller’s bestseller, and What Planet Are You From?, an unusually tame comedy starring Garry Shandling and Annette Bening.
Born Michael Igor Peschkowsky on Nov. 6, 1931, in Berlin, Nichols fled Nazi Germany for the U.S. at age seven with his Russian-Jewish family. He recalled in 1996 that at the time, he could say only two things in English: “I don’t speak English” and “Please don’t kiss me.”
In addition to lacking English, Nichols had lost all his body hair due to a defective vaccine for whooping cough when he arrived. It made him self-conscious throughout childhood and adolescence.
Nichols was an outsider at school, said Buck Henry, a classmate who became a scriptwriter for the director. Though Nichols claims he had become “the most popular of the unpopular kids” by high school, he found himself at the University of Chicago. He met the writer Susan Sontag on his first day there and became friends with future actors Ed Asner, Barbara Harris and Shelley Berman as well as May.
Nichols attended the University of Chicago but left to study acting in New York. He returned to Chicago, where he began working with May in the Compass Players, a comedy troupe that later became the Second City.
Their Broadway show, An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May, earned them 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 the Nichols films Primary Colors and The Birdcage.
Depressed by the split with May, Nichols went back to Chicago and then Vancouver, where he was pushed into directing. With nothing better lined up, an agent sent Nichols to Pennsylvania’s Bucks County playhouse to struggle with a new playwright’s script, Nobody Loves Me.
The playwright, Simon, feared his play wasn’t funny. Nichols calmed him by saying, “Let’s do it like King Lear.” The play, renamed Barefoot in the Park, made Robert Redford a star, ran for 1,530 performances on Broadway and won Nichols a Tony Award for directing.
Nichols married his fourth wife, Sawyer, in 1988. He had a daughter, Daisy, with his second wife, Margo Callas, as well as a son, Max, and a daughter Jenny, from his marriage to Annabel Davis-Goff.