Mike Nichols, one of America's most celebrated directors, whose long, protean sum of critic- and crowd-pleasing work earned him adulation both on Broadway and in Hollywood, died Wednesday. He was 83. His death was announced in a statement by the president of ABC News, James Goldston. Dryly urbane, Nichols had a gift for communicating with actors and a keen comic timing, which he honed early in his career as half of the popular sketch-comedy team Nichols and May. He accomplished what Orson Welles and Elia Kazan, but few if any other directors have: He achieved popular and artistic success in both theater and film. He was among the most decorated people in the history of show business, one of only a handful to have won an Oscar, a Tony, an Emmy and a Grammy.
His career encompassed an entire era of screen and stage entertainment. On Broadway, where he won an astonishing nine Tonys (including two as a producer), 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 bruising masterpiece, “Death of a Salesman.”
In June 2012 at age 80, he accepted the Tony for directing “Salesman.” When his name was announced at the Beacon Theater on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the neighborhood where he grew up, he kissed his wife, broadcaster Diane Sawyer, stepped to the stage and recalled that he once won a pie-eating contest in that very theater. “It was nice but this is nicer,” he said.
Whoopi and The Graduate
In 1984, as a producer, he brought a talented monologuist to Broadway, supervising the one-woman show - it was called, simply, “Whoopi Goldberg” - that propelled her to fame. Alone or with the company he founded, Icarus Productions, he produced a number of well-known shows, including the musical “Annie,” from which he earned a fortune (and a Tony), “The Real Thing” (another Tony) and Jules Feiffer’s play “Grown Ups.”
The first time Nichols stepped behind the camera, in 1966, it 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. Though he didn’t win then, the film won five.
Nichols did win an Oscar for his second film, “The Graduate” (1967), a shrewd social comedy that defined the uncertainty of adulthood for the generation that came of age in the 1960s and made a star of an unknown actor, Dustin Hoffman, who was nearly 30 when he played Benjamin Braddock, the 21-year-old protagonist of the film, a Southern Californian and a 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 Yorker, he was an odd choice for the all-American suburban boy whose seemingly prescribed life path has gone awry.
“There is no piece of casting in the 20th century that I know of that is more courageous than putting me in that part,” Hoffman said in an interview in The New Yorker in 2000. By the end of Nichols’ career, he was bravely casting the star Hoffman of a different generation - Philip Seymour - with whom Nichols made the rollicking political film “Charlie Wilson’s War” (2007), and, later, more provocatively, the Broadway production of “Death of a Salesman.” He cast Hoffman, then 44, to play Miller’s tragic American in defeat, Willy Loman, a man in his 60s. In addition to Nichols’ Tony Award for directing, the play won for best revival.He had also turned his attention to television, winning Emmy Awards for directing adaptations of two celebrated plays for HBO: Margaret Edson’s “Wit” (2001), about a woman dying of cancer; and Tony Kushner’s epic AIDS drama, “Angels in America” (2003).
Driven, forceful and, for all his wit and charm, known occasionally to strafe the feelings of cast and crew members, Nichols was prolific - too prolific, according to some critics who thought he sometimes chose his projects haphazardly or took on work simply for money.
Stars flocked
Still, his projects almost always had a high-profile glow, mainly because stars flocked to work with him. He directed Julie Christie, Lillian Gish, George C. Scott, Richard Dreyfuss and Morgan Freeman on Broadway. Off-Broadway he directed Steve Martin and Robin Williams as Vladimir and Estragon in “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett. Outdoors in the Delacorte Theater in Central Park he directed Meryl Streep, Natalie Portman, Christopher Walken, John Goodman and Kevin Kline in Chekhov’s “The Seagull.”
Nicholson, Harrison Ford, Julia Roberts, Ron Silver, Anne Bancroft, Candice Bergen and Gene Hackman all worked with Nichols more than once. When he directed Robert Redford and Elizabeth Ashley as appealingly bickering newlyweds in “Barefoot in the Park,” they were largely unknown.
When he directed Burton and Taylor in “Virginia Woolf” they were the biggest stars in the world. “A director’s chief virtue should be to persuade you through a role; Mike’s the only one I know who can do it,” Burton said after “Virginia Woolf” was finished, a remarkable compliment from a renowned actor for a fledgling director. “He conspires with you to get your best. He’d make me throw away a line where I’d have hit it hard. I’ve seen the film with an audience and he’s right every time. I didn’t think I could learn anything about comedy - I’d done all of Shakespeare’s. But from him I learned.”
