Mike Nichols, one of America’s most celebrated directors, who has died aged 83, was one of those rare figures whose work earned him adulation both on Broadway and in Hollywood and pleased audiences and critics alike.
Dryly urbane, Nichols had a gift for communicating with actors and a keen sense of comic timing, which he honed early in his career as half of the popular comedy sketch team Nichols and May.
An immigrant whose work was marked by trenchant perceptions of American culture, he achieved – in films like The Graduate, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, Carnal Knowledge, Catch 22 and Primary Colors – and in comedies and dramas on stage – what Orson Welles and Elia Kazan, but few other Americian directors did: popular and artistic success in both film and theatre.
He was one of only a dozen or so people to have won an Oscar, a Tony, an Emmy and a Grammy. On Broadway, where he won an astonishing nine Tonys, he once had four shows running simultaneously.
He directed Neil Simon's early comedies Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple in the 1960s, the zany Monty Python musical Spamalot four decades later, and nearly another decade after that an acclaimed revival of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. He introduced a talented monologuist to Broadway, supervising the one-woman show – it was called, simply, Whoopi Goldberg – that propelled her to fame.
Oscar nominations
The first time he stepped behind the camera, in 1966, was to direct Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor in an adaptation of Edward Albee’s scabrous stage portrayal of a marriage,
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
The film was nominated for 13 Academy Awards, including one for best director. Although he didn’t win, the film won five.
Nichols did win an Oscar for his second film, The Graduate (1967). A social satire that lampooned the Eisenhower-era mindset of the West Coast affluent and defined the uncertainty of adulthood for the generation that came of age in the 1960s, the film made an instant star of an unknown actor, Dustin Hoffman, who was nearly 30 when he played Benjamin Braddock, the 21-year-old protagonist, a Southern Californian track star who sleeps with the wife of his father's best friend and then falls in love with her daughter.
A small, dark, Jewish New York stage actor (though born and raised in Los Angeles), Hoffman was an odd choice for the role. “There is no piece of casting in the 20th century that I know of that is more courageous than putting me in that part,” he later said.
Nichols was prolific – too prolific, according to some critics, who thought he sometimes chose his projects haphazardly or took on work simply for money. Not every project was a winner; he had a number of duds, and for periods his career lost a bit of lustre.
Still, his projects almost always had a high-profile glow, mainly because stars flocked to work with him. He directed Julie Christie, George C Scott, Richard Dreyfuss and Morgan Freeman on Broadway. Off-Broadway he directed Steve Martin and Robin Williams.
Critics speculated that Nichols’s portrayals of American life were especially shrewd because he came to the country as a boy, felt alienated early on and never lost his outsider’s point of view.
He was born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin in 1931. His grandmother, Hedwig Lachmann, wrote the libretto for Richard Strauss's opera Salome; his grandfather, Gustav Landauer, was an anarchist leader killed by right-wing opponents in 1919.
Escape to America
His father, a doctor, fled to America to escape the Nazis in 1938, anglicising part of his name – Nicholaiyevitch – to become Paul Nichols. Michael and his younger brother, Robert, joined him in New York in the following year. Michael knew two sentences in English, he recalled in a 1964 interview: “I do not speak English” and “Please don’t kiss me.”
Young Michael’s sense of being a stranger in a strange land was aggravated by the loss of his hair at age four (he wore wigs thereafter), the result of a reaction to an inoculation.
He attended several schools, public and private, and after a brief false start at New York University went to the University of Chicago, where he threw off what he had considered a lonely and difficult childhood. “I never had a friend from the time I came to this country until I got to the University of Chicago,” he told one interviewer. To another, he described the university as “paradise” .
Nichols's last Broadway production, in 2013, was of Harold Pinter's Betrayal, starring Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz.
He is survived by his fourth wife, Diane Sawyer; a daughter, Daisy, from his second marriage, to Margo Callas; another daughter, Jenny, and a son, Max, from his third marriage to Annabel Davis-Goff; and a brother, Bob.