Director Mike Nichols dies at 83
NEW YORK — Mike Nichols, the director of matchless versatility who brought fierce wit, caustic social commentary and wicked absurdity to such film, TV and stage hits as “The Graduate,” “Angels in America” and “Monty Python’s Spamalot,” has died. He was 83.
The death was confirmed by ABC News President James Goldston today. Nichols died Wednesday evening. Goldston said the family was holding a small private service this week.
During a career spanning more than 50 years, Nichol, who was married to ABC’s Diane Sawyer, managed to be both an insider and outsider, an occasional White House guest and friend to countless celebrities. A former stand-up performer who began his career in a groundbreaking comedy duo with Elaine May and whose work brought him an Academy Award, a Grammy and multiple Tony and Emmy honors, Nichols had a remarkable gift for mixing edgy humor and dusky drama.
His 1966 film directing debut “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” unforgettably captured the vicious yet sparkling and sly dialogue of Edward Albee’s play, as a couple (Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor) torment each other over deep-seated guilt and resentment.
Nichols, who won directing Emmys for both “Angels in America” and “Wit,” said he liked stories about the real lives of real people and that humor inevitably pervades even the bleakest of such tales.
He was a wealthy, educated man who often mocked those just like him, never more memorably than in “The Graduate,” which shot Dustin Hoffman to fame in the 1967 story of an earnest young man rebelling against his elders’ expectations. Nichols himself would say that he identified with Hoffman’s awkward, perpetually flustered Benjamin Braddock.
