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Mike Nichols, who escaped Nazi Germany and became the legendary director of ‘The Graduate,’ has died

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November 20, 2014

Mike Nichols, the legendary film and stage director whose work was celebrated both by Broadway and Hollywood, died on Wednesday at his home in New York. He was 83.

His death was announced by James Goldston, the president of ABC News, the network where Nichols’ wife, Diane Sawyer, is a prominent broadcaster. The network said Nichols died suddenly of cardiac arrest.

Nichols was a monstrous talent, one of only a dozen people in the history of showbusiness who had won a Tony, an Oscar, an Emmy, and a Grammy over the course of his protean career. Revered for his work on both stage and screen, he directed such Hollywood classics as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and the 1967 cult-hit “The Graduate” starring Dustin Hoffman, which won him an Oscar at the age of 36. Nichols went on to direct many more critical and commercial successes including, “Working Girl,” “Silkwood” and “The Birdcage.” He also amassed an astonishing 9 Tony awards for his work directing Broadway hits “Barefoot in the Park,” “The Odd Couple,” “Spamalot” and the recent revival of “Death of Salesman” starring Dustin Hoffman – which won him his final Tony at the age of 80.

Over his five-decade career, Nichols had worked with the biggest stars of Broadway and Hollywood, including Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Tom Hanks, Kevin Spacey, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Emma Thompson and Natalie Portman, among others.  

In a display of solidarity and respect, Nichols’ colleagues in the film and theatre worlds have publicly mourned him. Filmmaker Steven Spielberg called his death “a seismic loss”; playwright John Patrick Shanley tweeted, “How could a giant be so graceful?” and actress Meryl Streep, who had been working with Nichols on an HBO revival of the Terrence McNally play “Masterclass” about Maria Callas, called him “an indelible irreplaceable man.”

Right from the start, Nichols’ was blessed with an incredible stroke of luck: He was born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky, the son of Jewish parents, in 1931 Berlin. His father, a physician, was born in Vienna to Russian Jewish immigrants who had been a prominent Siberian family until the Russian Revolution compelled them to emigrate. His mother’s parents were German Jews. Nichols was 7-years-old when he fled Germany and immigrated to the United States.

According to Wikipedia:

In April 1938, when the Nazis were arresting Jews in Berlin, seven-year-old Michael and his three-year-old brother Robert were sent alone to the United States to meet up with their father, who had fled months earlier. His mother eventually joined the family, escaping through Italy in 1940. The family moved to New York City on April 28, 1939. His father, whose original Russian name was Pavel Nikolaevich Peschkowsky, changed his name to Paul Nichols, Nichols derived from his Russian patronymic, and set up a successful medical practice inManhattan, enabling the family to live near Central Park.

Some have referred to Nichols as an “accidental” artist. He found his way to showbusiness rather unexpectedly, while enrolled in a pre-med program at the University of Chicago in the 1950s. It was there that he met the comedienne Elaine May, with whom he developed a popular sketch comedy act, “Nichols and May,” that made both of them famous.  In 1964, he directed his first Broadway show, “Barefoot in the Park” winning him his first Tony. He followed that with “Woolf,” commanding legendary performances from Taylor and Burton and winning five Academy Awards. Next came, “The Graduate” which catapulted him into the stratosphere of Hollywood legend.  

“Man, the world loved Mike Nichols,” ABC News anchor Robin Roberts said on “Good Morning America” this morning.

And Nichols loved back. He had been married twice before and had fathered three children when, at age 54, he met Sawyer and soon married her. The couple stayed together 26 years, until his death.

As the New York Times noted, “romantic narratives were his main vehicle.”

He examined marriages, from the nascent, as in “Barefoot in the Park”; to the suddenly crumbling, as in his film adaptation of “Heartburn” (1986), Nora Ephron’s novel about a wife betrayed by her philandering husband; to the weathered and unbearably brittle, as in “Virginia Woolf”… He examined courtship rituals in films like “Carnal Knowledge”…”Closer”… and “The Real Thing.” [And] found equally rich material in gay relationships, as exemplified in “The Birdcage[.]”

Commenting on his own oeuvre, he told The Washington Post in 1986: “I think maybe my subject is the relationships between men and women — centered around a bed.”

ABC News noted that Nichols made “smart movies about smart people,” and was fond of saying, “The time to make up your mind about people is never.”

That openness characterized his life and work, and made him a beloved artist and friend. In 2010, Nichols was presented with the American Film Institute (AFI) Lifetime Achievement Award. Streep, whom Nichols directed many times, including the films “Silkwood” “Heartburn” and the HBO miniseries “Angels in America,” said from the podium that he was “one of the era’s essential artists [and] essential people.”

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