(MENAFN- Khaleej Times) Director of The Graduate dies at 83.
Diane Sawyer and her husband film director Mike Nichols pose together at the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ 13th Annual Hall of Fame induction ceremonies in 1997
A legend of film theatre and comedy in nearly equal measure Mike Nichols was an unquestioned fixture of smart urbane American culture across a relentlessly versatile six-decade career that on stage or screen reliably coursed with crackling intelligence.
Nichols won nine Tonys an Oscar several Emmys and a Grammy. He made up the lanky half of his groundbreaking comic duo with Elaine May. As a director he made countless performers — from Dustin Hoffman to Melanie Griffith — into stars. To acclaim he adapted Edward Albee Neil Simon Tony Kushner and Arthur Miller.
Nichols who died on Wednesday night in New York at 83 was a supreme orchestrator of material talent and taste. In films like The Graduate Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Carnal Knowledge he left not only a firm stamp of authorship but with a dry wit and a classical eye he choreographed caustic social commentaries of couples drunk with bitterness bored with regret and apprehensive in flight.
“I keep coming back to it over and over: adultery and cheating” Nichols who was divorced three times before marrying ABC News’ Diane Sawyer in 1988 said last year. “It’s the most interesting problem in the theatre. How else do you get Oedipus That’s the first cheating in the theatre.”
Meryl Streep who stared in Nichols’ Silkwood and Heartburn recalled him as “a director who cried when he laughed a friend without whom well we can’t imagine our world.”
Steven Spielberg called Nichols’ passing a “seismic loss.”
“For me The Graduate was life altering — both as an experience at the movies as well as a master class about how to stage a scene” said Spielberg. “Mike had a brilliant cinematic eye and uncanny hearing for keeping scenes ironic and real.”
Born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin Nichols’ Jewish family emigrated to the U.S. in 1939. He began as a stand-up and comedy would remain the bedrock to this sensibility and sense of timing. He and May developed their great improvisational rapport into a saucy sophisticated stage show that took on sex marriage family and other subjects in a frank manner that titillated and startled audiences of the late 1950s and early ‘60s.
“People always thought we were making fun of other people when we were in fact making fun of ourselves” Nichols said in 1997. “We did teenagers in the back seat of the car and people committing adultery. Of course you’re making fun of yourself. You’re making jokes about yourself. Who can you better observe”
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.
“I have never understood people dividing things into dramas and comedies” said Nichols who won directing Emmys for both Angels and Wit. ‘’There are more laughs in Hamlet than many Broadway comedies.”
He was a wealthy educated man who often mocked those just like him never more memorably than in The Graduate which shot Hoffman to fame in the 1967 story of an earnest young man rebelling against his elders’ expectations.
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.
Nichols won the best-director Oscar for The Graduate which co-starred Anne Bancroft as an aging temptress pursuing Hoffman.
Nichols often collaborated with Jack Nicholson Emma Thompson and Streep. Other stars who worked with Nichols included Al Pacino (Angels in America) Robin Williams (The Birdcage) Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver (Working Girl) and Julia Roberts (Closer).
On Broadway he won 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 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.”