Mike Nichols

Mike Nichols (1931- ), American film director, born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin. His family, who were Jewish, fled from Nazi Germany to the United States in 1938, and Nichols became an American citizen in 1944. After studying at the University of Chicago, his early career, much of it in partnership with the comedienne, actress, and director Elaine May, was in improvisational comedy. From 1963 Nichols developed a reputation as an innovative stage director, directing the first Broadway comedies of Neil Simon.

Nichols is best known for his series of films satirizing post-war American society. In their themes of sexual experimentation and the rejection of social conformity, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton), The Graduate (1967, featuring Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft), Catch-22 (1970, adapted from the novel by Joseph Heller), and Carnal Knowledge (1971, with Jack Nicholson) resonated with the mood of the 1960s counter-culture and its aftermath of disillusionment. Nichols won the Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Director for The Graduate. After this concentrated period of work, Nichols directed very few films before Silkwood (1983, starring Meryl Streep and Cher), his first partnership with the screenwriter Nora Ephron, who would also script his next film, Heartburn (1986, with Streep and Nicholson). The latter film, along with Biloxi Blues (1988), Postcards from the Edge (1990, featuring Streep and Shirley MacLaine), and Regarding Henry (1991, starring Harrison Ford and Annette Bening), represented a return to the literate, middle-class tragicomedy of his earlier work, but Nichols’s most popular later film, Working Girl (1988, with Ford and Melanie Griffith), focused on the aspirations of a working-class protagonist. In the 1990s Nichols experimented with different genres, renewing a regular partnership with Jack Nicholson in Wolf (1994) and remaking La Cage aux Folles (1978, directed by Edouard Molinaro) as The Birdcage (1996). Primary Colors (1998), with John Travolta and Emma Thompson, followed, adapted from the best-selling roman-à-clef that famously first appeared anonymously, fictionalizing the details of the successful 1992 presidential campaign of Bill Clinton. He later directed the Garry Shandling comedy What Planet Are You From? (2000); Emma Thompson in Wit (2001), a harrowing account of a woman's struggle with ovarian cancer; and the television mini-series Angels in America (2003), adapted from the play by Tony Kushner. His most recent film work is the screen version (2004) of the Patrick Marber play Closer. In 2005 he won a Tony Award as Best Director for the Monty Python musical Spamalot on Broadway; the production also received the Best Musical accolade.