LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Mike Nichols
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Mike Nichols' next film Catch-22, now regarded as noble, was a screen failure. He directed Carnal Knowledge with renewed vigor. Working Girl and Silkwood dealt with gender issues. All were successful projects. His films generally included comic spirit blended with his satiric sensibility. Mike Nichol and May were reunited in The Birdcage (1996), one of the hilarious comedy written by May.
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Any hack can film a sex scene, but director Mike Nichols is a connoisseur of pre- and postcoital moments. He was the guy, don't forget, behind that indelible image of Anne Bancroft slipping off her nylon stocking in "The Graduate," as Dustin Hoffman hovered near the hotel-room door. Now, in "Charlie Wilson's War," he stages an après-sex scene between Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts in which he avoids the cliché of "sheets tangled just so, and the man getting out of bed in his boxer shorts," as Nichols puts it. He places his actors in a palatial bathroom, with Hanks, as the hard-partying Texas congressman Wilson, soaking in the tub, while Roberts, as a Houston socialite who's his occasional lover, sits in front of a mirror applying her makeup. Now that she's slept with him, there are a few things she wants—items not available from Neiman Marcus. And as she talks, she concentrates on separating her thickly mascaraed eyelashes with the lethal end of a safety pin.
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A deft humorist and social critic, director Mike Nichols has managed to skewer mainstream sensibilities in crowd-pleasing work throughout most of his career. Collaborating with such renowned writers as Buck Henry and original stage partner Elaine May, the theatrically trained Nichols excelled at adapting plays and novels for the screen, and eliciting superb performances from his actors. Born Michael Peschkowsky in Berlin, Nichols and his family emigrated to the U.S. in 1938, to escape the Nazis. Though his father's death several years later left his family poor, Nichols worked his way through college at the University of Chicago, where he decided to become an actor. After studying with Lee Strasberg in New York, Nichols headed back to Chicago, where he formed an improv group with several actors, including May and Alan Arkin. Their comic and critical sensibilities well matched, Nichols and May performed as a pair in the latter half of the 1950s, earning raves for their sharp, satirical routines.
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You'd have thought that Nora Ephron and Mike Nichols had remade Heaven's Gate: that was the critical reaction to this film version of Ephron's semiautobiographical novel about her own marital woes. The fact that they had Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep playing thinly disguised versions of Carl Bernstein and Ephron probably made them bigger, fatter targets. In fact, the film was a genuinely funny and painful look at the effects of marital infidelity and divorce, in the story of two married writers and what happens when the pregnant wife finds out the husband has been fooling around behind her back. The film is more dramatic and less quip-filled than Ephron's novel, which made the Ephron character a food writer and was peppered with recipes. Nicholson stepped into his role at the last minute, when Nichols fired Mandy Patinkin for being too intense and not funny enough. --Marshall Fine
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After their break-up in 1961, Mike Nichols truly devoted himself to direct for Broadway stage. He worked with writers like Neil Simon, Anton Chekhov, Tom Stoppard to produce Barefoot in the Park, Luv, The Odd Couple and Plaza Suit. His debut film Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) was a grand success. He added new dimension to film technique to make it 'modernistic'.
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Mike Nichols, 74, wins the 2006 Common Wealth Award for Dramatic Arts. Nichols has been one of the foremost directors of stage and screen for more than 30 years. His Broadway directing credits include hits such as Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple and Plaza Suite. Nichols has directed standout movies including, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, which earned him an Oscar for Best Director, Carnal Knowledge and Silkwood. His television credits include the award-winning HBO productions of Wit and Angels in America. In 2005, Nichols earned his eighth lifetime Tony Award as director of the smash musical, Spamalot.
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Mike Nichols