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Mike Nichols Bio
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Mike Nichols
Mike Nichols is part of an elite group of people to have won the four major entertainment award categories – Emmy, Tony, Academy Award, and Grammy. He may have started out his career very simply as a comic from Chicago, but Nichols has evolved to being one of the most sought after directors in the industry.
Nichols was born under the name Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin, Germany on November 6, 1931. His Russian Jewish family escaped the Nazis by leaving the country in 1939 and coming to the United States. His father was quite the intellectual, hanging out with the sister of Vladimir Nabokov and the parents of Boris Pasternak while living in Germany.
It was during the 1950s, while Nichols was attending the University of Chicago, that he started getting into comedy. He did improvisational work with the Compass Players, which included such noted comedians as Elaine May, Edward Asner, Paul Sills, and Byrne Piven. Together they developed the Second City Improv, an offshoot of the Compass Players. Nichols also started a radio program, Midnight Special, that played folk music.
May and Nichols were known at the time as the world’s fastest humans, due to the speed with which they could spout out improve lines. They appeared on television and radio, in nightclubs, and also on record albums, ultimately earning a Grammy. May and Nichols even had their own Broadway show. Tensions between the two created a rift in their partnership, and they broke up after closing A Matter of Position, written by May and starring Nichols. After some time apart, they collaborated again, with her fixing up some of his scripts.
After his breakup with May, Nichols became a successful director, and often worked on Neil Simon’s projects. Although he directed the Broadway versions of Neil Simon’s plays, such as Barefoot in the Park with Robert Redford, The Odd Couple with Walter Matthau and Art Carney, and Plaza Suite, when it came time for film adaptations of these plays, Nichols wasn’t used as director. Ironically, with the one Neil Simon movie he did put to film, Biloxi Blues with Matthew Broderick, he didn’t do the play version of it.
Nichols had Broadway success other than just Neil Simon-written originals. He directed The Real Thing starring Glenn Close and Jeremy Irons, and Hurlyburly, which refers to a term used in Shakepeare’s MacBeth. This starred William Hurt, Christopher Walken, and Sigourney Weaver. Nichols also directed a revival of Little Foxes starring Anne Bancroft and George C. Scott. He adds to this list two musicals – The Apple Tree, which was a commercial failure and starred Barbara Harris in a Tony winning role, and the very successful Spamalot, based on the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, starring Tim Curry, David Hyde Pierce, and Hank Azaria. This won him just one of his many Tony awards.
The first film Nichols directed was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and George Segal. This is just one of the many scripts May helped with. Nichols’ very next movie was The Graduate, which won him his Academy Award, helped turn Dustin Hoffman into a star, and also hooked Nichols up once again with Anne Bancroft. He also had huge successes with Silkwood, starring Meryl Streep, Kurt Russell, and Cher, and Working Girl starring Melanie Griffith, Sigourney Weaver, and Harrison Ford.
After working with Meryl Streep again in Postcards From the Edge, Nichols went on to film Birdcage a film that boasted a star-studded cast including Robin Williams, Gene Wilder, Nathan Lane, Diane Wiest, Hank Azaria, and Calista Flockhart. Next, he directed another big cast in Primary Colors. It starred John Travolta, Emma Thompson, Billy Bob Thornton, Kathy Bates, Larry Hagman, and Diane Ladd. Nichols directed Emma Thompson once again in the television movie, Wit, and earned himself his Emmy.
Nichols is currently married to TV newswoman Diane Sawyer, although he has been married three other times to Annabel Davis-Goff, Margo Callas, and Pat Scott. He has two children from his first marriage to Davis-Goff, and another child from his marriage to Callas. |
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Mike Nichols - Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel wrote the soundtrack for the Mike Nichols' film 'The Graduate.'
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Mike Nichols - Directed the Broadway version of 'Barefoot in the Park' with Robert Redford . |
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Mike Nichols - Directed the Broadway version of 'The Odd Couple' with Walter Matthau . |
Mike Nichols - Directed 'Biloxi Blues' with Matthew Broderick .
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Mike Nichols - Sara Ramirez starred in Monty Python's 'Spamolot' directed by Mike Nichols.
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Yuddy top celebrities
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