The German-Jewish refugee who became one of the foundational New Hollywood directors. Two consecutive Best Director Oscars (1966 and 1967) and a fifty-year working career that crossed cinema and Broadway theatre.
Mike Nichols arrived in the United States as a seven-year-old German-Jewish refugee in 1939. He grew up in New York, attended the University of Chicago in the late 1940s, and developed his first major working profile as half of the Nichols and May comedy duo with Elaine May across the late 1950s. The two performed live-improvisation comedy that became, by the early 1960s, one of the most-influential American comedy projects of its decade.
His transition to directing began on Broadway in 1963. His first feature, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), won Best Director and was nominated for thirteen Oscars (winning five). His second feature, The Graduate (1967), won Best Director (his second consecutive). The dual-Best-Director achievement positioned Nichols as one of the foundational figures of the New Hollywood transition.
His subsequent filmography across nearly fifty years includes Catch-22 (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971), Silkwood (1983), Working Girl (1988), Postcards from the Edge (1990), The Birdcage (1996), Primary Colors (1998), Closer (2004), and Charlie Wilson's War (2007). His parallel Broadway career produced multiple Tony Award-winning productions across the same decades. He is one of the small set of working artists to have won the EGOT (Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony) — a structural achievement that very few entertainment-industry figures have accomplished.
Nichols's specific working approach was, by general industry assessment across decades, focused on actor performance more than on conventional visual filmmaking. His films are rarely visually distinctive in the way that Kubrick's or Wes Anderson's are; the camerawork is competent without being signature. What distinguishes Nichols's films is the consistent quality of performance across his casts.
The actor-focused working approach is partly his Nichols-and-May background. Live-improvisation comedy requires intensive performer development; the working relationship between director and actor in that tradition is closer than the broader film-industry standard. Nichols brought the working approach to his subsequent film career; almost every Nichols film features at least one career-defining performance from its lead. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Virginia Woolf, Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate, Jack Nicholson in Carnal Knowledge, Meryl Streep in Silkwood and Postcards from the Edge, Robin Williams in The Birdcage, Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson's War — the list is unusually long.
Nichols's films are, almost without exception, contemporary social satires. The Graduate engages the late-1960s generational divide. Catch-22 engages the Vietnam-era political moment. Working Girl engages 1980s American corporate culture. The Birdcage engages 1990s American attitudes toward gay-male couples. Closer engages contemporary urban relationship dynamics. Charlie Wilson's War engages 1980s American foreign-policy.
What's structurally distinctive is the willingness to engage contemporary material directly rather than through historical-period framing. Nichols's films are typically set in their year of release; the social commentary is current rather than retrospective. The pattern persisted across his fifty-year career; even his late work continued to engage contemporary-American social material directly. Few other working directors at his commercial scale have maintained this commitment to contemporary-set satire across such an extended career.
Nichols maintained an active Broadway directing career in parallel with his film work across his entire post-1963 career. He directed Tony Award-winning productions of Barefoot in the Park (1964), The Odd Couple (1965), Plaza Suite (1968), The Real Thing (1984), Death of a Salesman (2012), and many others. The Broadway productions and the film productions operated as complementary working projects; Nichols would alternate between mediums across his career without committing exclusively to either.
The parallel career is, in some sense, the structural foundation of his actor-focused working approach. Broadway directing requires intensive performer development that film directing does not always require; the rehearsal-based working method translates productively between the two mediums. Nichols's specific gift is the willingness to apply Broadway-rehearsal-quality performer development to commercial film production. The combination produced one of the most-consistent performance-quality filmographies in modern American cinema.
If you've never watched a Nichols film:
Elaine May (his Nichols-and-May partner), the European-Jewish-refugee intellectual tradition of his New York upbringing, Broadway theatre conventions, Marlon Brando and the Method-acting tradition, the immediate-predecessor generation of American comedy directors (Billy Wilder, Stanley Donen).