The nine-time Tony Award winner on Broadway and the Oscar-winning director of influential films such as The Graduate and Carnal Knowledge, died on Wednesday at age 83. The prolific director passed away at his home of cardiac arrest.
No director had ever moved between Broadway and Hollywood as easily as Nichols, one of the few people to win the Oscar, Tony, Emmy and Grammy Awards. His career first blossomed with a comedy partnership with Elaine May in the late 1950s, was married to Diane Sawyer, former anchorwoman of ABC’s World News Tonight broadcast.
ABC News President James Goldston announced Nichols’ death in a memo to staff, saying he “passed away suddenly on Wednesday evening.”
“In a triumphant career that spanned over six decades, Mike created some of the most iconic works of American film, television and theater,” Goldston said. “He was a true visionary.”
“An inspiration and joy to know, a director who cried when he laughed, a friend without whom, well, we can’t imagine our world, an indelible irreplaceable man,” actor Meryl Streep said in a statement.
Actor Tom Hanks said “Nichols changed the lives of those who knew him, who loved him, who will miss him so …”
Nichols was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin, where his parents had settled after leaving Russia. He came to the United States at age 7 when his family fled the Nazis in 1939.
He grew up in New York feeling like an outsider because of his limited English speaking skills and odd appearance – a reaction to a whooping-cough vaccine had caused permanent hair loss. As a University of Chicago student, he fought depression, but found like-minded friends such as May.
In the late 1950s, Nichols and May formed a stand-up team at the forefront of a comedy movement that included Lenny Bruce, Jonathan Winters and Woody Allen in satirizing contemporary American life. They won a Grammy in 1961 for best comedy album before splitting.
In the mid-1960s, Nichols became a directing powerhouse on Broadway with Barefoot in the Park, the first of what would be a successful relationship with playwright Neil Simon.
Nichols also made an impact on American cinema with three influential movies in a five-year period which included a 1966 adaption of the Edward Albee play Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. It was nominated for an Oscar in all 13 categories and won five of them, although Nichols did not take the best director award.
He followed that up a year later with The Graduate, starring then little-known Dustin Hoffman as an aimless college graduate seduced by Anne Bancroft as an older woman before falling in love with her daughter. Nichols won an Academy Award for his direction and the movie, which became a 1960s cultural touchstone, thanks to several memorable lines and the music of Simon and Garfunkel.
He won an Emmy in 2001 for Wit and another in 2003 for Angels in America, a TV miniseries about the AIDS epidemic.
In the mid 1980s, Nichols suffered a psychotic breakdown, which he said was related to a prescription sedative that made him so delusional he thought he had lost all his money.
Despite his urbane, intellectual manner, Nichols once had a reputation as an on-the-set screamer. Streep commented, “He was always the smartest and most brilliant person in the room, and he could be the meanest, too.”
The actor said that changed after Nichols married Sawyer, his fourth wife. Nichols had three children from his earlier marriages.
Published in The Express Tribune, November 22nd, 2014.
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