Skip to Content

RIP Mike Nichols

RIP Mike Nichols

Mike Nichols

Mike Nichols, the Oscar winning director of The Graduate and the storied star of Broadway, passed away Wednesday evening. He was 83.

Nichols is one of the famous few EGOT winners, having started his career as a comedy performer with an improv comedy troupe and in a comedy duo along with Elaine May. His Broadway career as a director started skyrocketing in the ’60s when he directed Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, The Knack and Luv.

And yet his early film career in the late ’60s, including Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Elizabeth Taylor and The Graduate, the movie that made Dustin Hoffman a star, helped shaped modern cinema. The making of these films, as documented in Mark Harris’s Pictures at a Revolution, helped usher in New Hollywood and signaled a shifting tide in the way movies are made.

He went on to make such classics as Silkwood, Working Girl, The Birdcage, and the Emmy and Golden Globe dominating miniseries Angels in America. His last film, Charlie Wilson’s War with Tom Hanks Julia Roberts and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, arrived in 2007.

Throughout his stage career, Nichols directed 23 plays in all on Broadway, including Annie, The Real Thing, Spamalot, Betrayal and Death of a Salesman.

[wpchatai]