Actors - Mike Nichols

Home > Listing Index > Actors > Mike Nichols

	Actors - Mike Nichols

Mike Nichols (born November 6 1931 as Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin, Germany) is an Academy Award-winning movie and stage director of films such as The Graduate
and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
.

Nichols was born to a Russian Jewish family in 1931. In 1939, his father fled the Nazis by moving the family to the U.S. While attending the University of Chicago in the 1950s, he began work in improvisational comedy with the Compass Players troupe (a precursor to The Second City) and later started the long-running Midnight Special folk music program on radio station WFMT. He teamed up to form a comedy team with Elaine May, with whom he appeared in nightclubs, on radio, released best-selling records, guested on several television programs and had their own show on Broadway (directed by Arthur Penn).

Personal idiosyncrasies and tensions (the latter culminating in the out-of-town closing of A Matter of Position, a new play written by May and starring Nichols) eventually drove this great comic duo apart to pursue other pursuits in 1961. Happily, they later reconciled and worked together many times, including May's doctoring of more than one script of a Nichols film (such as Wolf; "she saved my ass on that one," he has said) and, eventually, her providing the wonderful scripts for his movies The Birdcage
and Primary Colors
. (There was also talk of their collaborating on a new version of Kind Hearts and Coronets
, starring Robin Williams.) They also appeared together at President Carter's inaugural gala and in a 1980 New Haven stage revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
(with the ideal supporting cast of Swoosie Kurtz and James Naughton).

Nichols' solo career ultimately became that of director. His Broadway credits include a remarkable string of plays by Neil Simon. They had five successive megahits with Barefoot in the Park
(the 1963 comedy that launched the career of Robert Redford), The Odd Couple
(1965), The Prisoner of Second Avenue
(1971) and Plaza Suite
(1968). (Curiously, though Nichols won the Best Director Tony for each of the five, he did not direct the film versions of any of them. His only screen direction of a Simon script came much later, with Biloxi Blues. That play was directed on Broadway by Gene Saks, who had helmed the film versions of Barefoot and The Odd Couple!) Nichols and Simon's only other Broadway collaboration to date was their last -- 1981's Fools, a quick failure.

Nichols directed many other plays on Broadway, some in their original New York productions (1964's Luv, 1976's Streamers
and Comedians, 1977's The Gin Game, 1980's Lunch Hour, 1984's The Real Thing and Hurlyburly
, 1986's Social Security and 1992's Death and the Maiden
), some revivals of established classics (1967's The Little Foxes
and 1973's Uncle Vanya, both with glittering all-star casts). He's twice directed a Broadway musical, one a fascinating failure (1966's The Apple Tree, which nonetheless won his fellow Second City performer Barbara Harris a Best Actress Tony) and the other a megahit (2005's Spamalot
). Moreover, he produced the original Broadway productions of Annie
(1977), Billy Bishop Goes to War (1980), Grown Ups (1981), Whoopi Goldberg
(the 1984 one-woman show that made her a star; Nichols also "supervised" this production and produced the 2004 revival) and The Play What I Wrote (2003).

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Mike Nichols ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Mike Nichols; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Actors - Mike Nichols

Searches on eBay

Related searches on eBay