Oscar-winning filmmaker Mike Nicholas has died today. The director of The Graduate, Working Girl and The Birdcage was 83 years old.
Born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky, the filmmaker fled to American as a young boy to escape Nazi Germany. His family adopted the name “Nichols” upon immigrating. Mike Nichols became a naturalized American citizen in 1944, and attended the University of Chicago in the 1950s before dropping out in 1954. He joined Lee Strasburg’s Acting Studio and became a member of the Compass Players where he met Elaine May. Together they became a comedy duo.
After splitting with May, Mike Nichols took up directing in earnest, helming the acclaimed plays Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple, winning multiple Tony Awards. His first feature film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, and won five Academy Awards, including Best Actress for Taylor.
But although Mike Nichols was justifiably acclaimed for his first film, it was his second, 1967’s The Graduate, that would become his calling card. The film starred Dustin Hoffman as a recent college graduate whose affair with an older woman, Mrs. Robinson, played by Anne Bancroft, was a commercial success that captured a special breed of youthful detachment and romantic angst. The soundtrack, by Simon & Garfunkel, included the famous songs “The Sound of Silence” and “Mrs. Robinson,” and is now considered one of the greatest ever produced.
Mike Nichols continued to work in both the theater and in film, directing mostly acclaimed dramas and comedies. Amongst his many career highlights: Carnal Knowledge (1971), a pointed sexual drama starring Jack Nicholson, Ann-Margret, Candice Bergen and Art Garfunkel, Silkwood (1983), starring Meryl Streep as a woman purposefully irradiated to prevent her from exposing safety violations at a plutonium processing plant, Working Girl (1988), a glass-ceiling comedy starring Melanie Griffith, Sigourney Weaver and Harrison Ford, The Birdcage (1996), a remake of the French comedy classic La Cauge Aux Folles starring Robin Williams, Nathan Lane and Gene Hackman, and Primary Colors (1998), a fictionalized account of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign starring John Travolta, Emma Thompson and Kathy Bates.
Mike Nichols directed his final film, Charlie Wilson’s War, in 2007. The film starred Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman (who received an Oscar-nomination for Best Supporting Actor), and told the story of how the title Texas Congressman helped stop the Cold War but planted the seeds for the War on Terror in the process.
To say that cinema and theater have suffered a great loss would be an egregious understatement. Mike Nichols was a rarity in the entertainment industry, blurring the lines between comedy and drama to tell meaningful stories that entertained and enlightened. He is survived by his wife Diane Sawyer, whom he married in 1988.
CraveOnline extends its heartfelt condolences to Mike Nichols’ friends and family, and thank him for his decades of beautiful, unforgettable work. He will be missed.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast and The Blue Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
