NEW YORK (AP) – A legend of film, theater and comedy in nearly equal measure, Mike Nichols was an unquestioned fixture of smart, urbane American culture across a relentlessly versatile, six-decade career that on stage or screen, reliably coursed with crackling intelligence.
Nichols won nine Tonys, an Oscar, several Emmys and a Grammy. He made up the lanky half of his groundbreaking comic duo with Elaine May. As a director, he made countless performers – from Dustin Hoffman to Melanie Griffith – into stars. To acclaim, he adapted Edward Albee, Neil Simon, Tony Kushner and Arthur Miller.
Nichols, who died Wednesday night in New York at 83, was a supreme orchestrator of material, talent and taste. In films like “The Graduate,” ”Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” and “Carnal Knowledge,” he left not only a firm stamp of authorship, but with a dry wit and a classical eye, he choreographed caustic social commentaries of couples drunk with bitterness, bored with regret and apprehensive in flight.
“I keep coming back to it, over and over: adultery and cheating,” Nichols, who was divorced three times before marrying ABC News’ Diane Sawyer in 1988, said last year. “It’s the most interesting problem in the theater. How else do you get Oedipus? That’s the first cheating in the theater.”
Meryl Streep, who stared in Nichols’ “Silkwood” and “Heartburn,” recalled him as “a director who cried when he laughed, a friend without whom, well, we can’t imagine our world.”