Mike Nichols remembered for pushing cultural change

Academy Award-winner Mike Nichols, a prolific stage and screen director, died of a heart attack yesterday at age 83. His career spanned seven decades, from 1958 improvisational routines with Elaine May to a star-studded Broadway revival of Harold Pinter's Betrayal in 2013. His most famous film, The Graduate, an iconic comedy of the sexual revolution, led to more projects that pushed for cultural change in an audience-friendly manner, such as Working Girl (1988) and The Birdcage (1996).

Born Michael Igor Peschkowsky on Nov. 6, 1931, in Berlin, Nichols at age 7 fled Nazi Germany for America with his family. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Nichols struggled to fit in: Completely bald from age four (from a whooping cough medication), he wore wigs all his life. He also mourned the premature death of his father from leukemia. After seeing the Elia Kazan-directed A Streetcar Named Desire, Nichols left the University of Chicago to pursue the stage.

Nichols captivated Broadway in the 1960s, helming Neil Simon’s Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple before engaging darker material with a 1966 film adaptation of Edward Albee’s brutally frank Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

That intense examination of two couples’ threatened marriages led to Nichols’ later work: “I keep coming back to it, over and over—adultery and cheating. … It’s the most interesting problem in the theater. How else do you get Oedipus?” Nichols pursued these themes in such films as Closer (2004), Carnal Knowledge (1971), and Primary Colors (1998).

Bouts with depression and a penchant for self-criticism fostered Nichols’ ability to laugh at the foibles of the human race. Divorced three times, Nichols is survived by his fourth wife, Diane Sawyer, whom he married in 1988.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.