Mike Nichols, Director of ‘The Graduate,’ Has Passed Away
Mike Nichols was a bastion of the Hollywood filmmaking system for more than 50 years during his storied and classic-making career. On Wednesday, he died at the age of 83 due to unexpected heart complications.
Mike worked in theatre, film and television with great success — being one of only a small elite to win an Oscar, an Emmy, a Tony, a Grammy and a Golden Globe over the course of his life. Perhaps most prominently, he was known for the groundbreaking comedy-drama The Graduate with Dustin Hoffman — easily one of the most referenced films of all time due to Nichols’ deft handling of the iconic final scene where Dustin and Katharine Ross flee the latter’s wedding to ride away on the back of a bus together.
But despite the larger-than-life legacy of The Graduate, it still feels rather incomplete to say that it was Mike’s defining classic — even if it does still hold the slot as the 21st highest grossing film of all time. Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in particular is a towering work in its own right — with its performances from Elizabeth Taylor and and newcomer Sandy Dennis winning Academy Awards that year.
With the huge success of The Graduate, Nichols soldiered onward in a career where he worked with dozens of huge names in Hollywood — Jack Nicholson, Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep among them. Many of these actors experienced a closeness with Mike that went beyond their professional work. Meryl, who Nichols directed in the HBO miniseries Angels in America, told The Hollywood Reporter that she was concerned for Mike’s mental health before he met his wife at the time of his death — ABC news correspondent Diane Sawyer.
“He had really hit a wall… He’d had a sort of breakdown, and then he met Diane, and everything changed. Before, he was always the smartest and most brilliant person in the room — and he could be the meanest, too — but now, that’s just an arrow in his creative arsenal.”
Other than drumming up career-defining performances for actors like Hoffman and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate, Mike had a reputation in Hollywood for being able to bridge that ever-treacherous gap between what the public wanted to see and what critics wanted to praise. In The New York Times obituary following Nichols’ death, the paper marked it as the overriding trait of Mike’s career.
“Dryly urbane, with a gift for communicating with actors and keen comic timing that he honed early in his career as half of the celebrated sketch-comedy team Nichols and May, Mr. Nichols accomplished what Orson Welles and Elia Kazan but few if any other directors have: He achieved popular and artistic success in both theater and film.”
Other than The Graduate and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, what other Mike Nichols films are you a fan of?
[Image via MindReels]
