Mike Nichols
Mike Nichols was an American film director, theatre director, film producer, playwright, actor, and comedian who worked in both English and German.
Born in Berlin on November 6, 1931, Nichols emigrated to the United States and later studied at the University of Chicago. He went on to build a career that spanned multiple disciplines in the performing arts, working across stage, screen, and comedy. His bilingual background — rooted in both German and English — reflected his origins as a Berlin-born artist who became a naturalized American citizen. He died in New York City on November 19, 2014.
Among the honors Nichols accumulated over the course of his career, he received the Academy Award for Best Director and the BAFTA Award for Best Direction, recognizing his work in film. His contributions to theatre were acknowledged with the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play, while his work in television earned him the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Directing for a Limited Series, Movie, or Dramatic Special. Earlier in his career, his comedic work was recognized with the Grammy Award for Best Comedy Album. These four awards — Grammy, Emmy, Oscar, and Tony — reflect the range of disciplines in which he worked as a director, producer, actor, and comedian. Later in life he also received the AFI Life Achievement Award, the National Medal of Arts, and the Kennedy Center Honors. His career thus encompassed comedy performance, theatrical direction, film direction, and film production, and his work as a comedian in the earlier phase of that career remained a distinct thread running through his broader professional identity.
Quotes by Mike Nichols
There's nothing better than discovering, to your own astonishment, what you're meant to do. It's like falling in love.
I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That's the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.
I never understand when people say, ‘Do you do comedy or tragedy?’ I don’t think they’re very much different. They both have to be true, and there isn’t a great play in the world that doesn’t have funny parts to it – as ‘Salesman’ does, as ‘King Lear’ does. The whole idea is to reflect life in some way, which means surely you have to have both.
I came to love silence, because it’s so rare, and it’s now my favorite aural condition.
That seems to me the greatest American danger we’re all in, that we’ll bargain away the experience of being alive for the appearance of it.
It’s not a filmmaker’s job to explain his technique but to tell his story the best way he can.