A master of stage, screen and TV dies at 83
Multi-award-winning director known for caustic social commentary and ‘sparkling wit’
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.”
The family will hold a private service this week, Goldston said. A memorial will be held later.
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.
Similarly, Nichols’ 2001 TV adaptation of the play Wit packed biting levity within the stark story of a college professor dying of cancer.
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.
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.” He won the best director Oscar for the film.
Born Michael Igor Peschkowsky on Nov. 6, 1931, in Berlin, Nichols fled Nazi Germany for the United States 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.”
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.