Director brought out best in actors By Shelley Acoca ASSOCIATED PRESS NEW YORK — During a career spanning more than 50 years, director Mike Nichols managed to become both an insider and an outsider in the entertainment industry. And, as a friend to numerous celebrities and an occasional White House guest, he was as likely to satirize the elite as to break bread with them. Nichols died unexpectedly on Wednesday at age 83. “No one was more passionate than Mike,” said ABC News President James Goldston, who confirmed the death by email. Nichols was married to Diane Sawyer, former anchorwoman of World News Tonight on ABC. The family is expected to have a private service this week and a memorial at a later date. Nichols, a director of matchless versatility, lent fierce wit, wicked absurdity and caustic social commentary to film, TV and stage hits such as The Graduate, Angels in America and Spamalot. Meryl Streep, whose films for Nichols included Silk-wood and Heartburn, called him “an inspiration and joy to know; a director who cried when he laughed; . . . an indelible, irreplaceable man.” And Tom Hanks, who starred in Nichols’ Charlie Wilson’s War, quoted him as saying: “Forward! We must always move forward. Otherwise, what will become of us?” Nichols — whose work earned an Academy Award, a Grammy and multiple Tony and Emmy honors — had a remarkable gift for mixing edgy humor and dusky drama. His 1966 film directing debut Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? unforgettably captured the vicious yet sparkling and sly dialogue of Edward Albee’s play. Angels in America, the 2003 TV miniseries adapted from the stage sensation, blended rich pathos and whimsy in its portrait of people coping with AIDS. Nichols said he liked stories about real people and that humor inevitably pervades even the bleakest of such tales. “I have never understood people dividing things into dramas and comedies,” Nichols said in a 2004 interview. “There are more laughs in Hamlet than many Broadway comedies.” He was a wealthy, educated man who often mocked those like him, never more memorably than in The Graduate, which shot Dustin Hoffman to fame in the 1967 story of an earnest young man rebelling against his elders’ expectations. Nichols said he identified with Hoffman’s awkward, perpetually flustered Benjamin Braddock. Nichols won the best-director Oscar for The Graduate. Not just actors but great actors clamored to work with Nichols, who had an empathy that helped bring out the best of those he put in front of the camera. Nichols often collaborated with Jack Nicholson, Streep and Emma Thompson. Other stars who worked with Nichols included Al Pacino (Angels in America), Gene Hack-man and Robin Williams (The Birdcage), Harrison Ford, Melanie Griffith and Sigourney Weaver (Working Girl) and Julia Roberts (Closer). Just as he moved easily among stage, screen and television, Nichols fearlessly switched from genre to genre. Onstage, he tackled comedy (The Odd Couple), classics (Uncle Vanya) and musicals (The Apple Tree). He won nine Tonys for directing. Though known for films with a comic edge, Nichols branched into thrillers with Day of the Dolphin, horror with Wolf and real-life drama with Silkwood. Nichols’ golden touch failed him on occasion with duds such as the anti-war satire Catch-22 and What Planet Are You From? Born Michael Igor Peschkowsky on Nov. 6, 1931, in Berlin, Nichols fled Nazi Germany for America at age 7 with his family. He recalled in 1996 that, at the time, he could say only two things in English: “I don’t speak English” and “Please, don’t kiss me.” Never one to analyze his career, Nichols would shrug off questions that sought to link his work. “What I sort of think about is what Orson Welles told me — which is: Leave it to the other guys, the people whose whole job it is to do that, to make patterns and say what the thread is through your work and where you stand,” Nichols said in 1996. “Let somebody else worry about what it means.”
Posted on: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 11:48:54 +0000
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