Nov. 20--After making "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" in 1966 with first-time feature film director Mike Nichols, Richard Burton acknowledged the newcomer's wily practicality in communicating with all sorts of actors. "He'd make me throw away a line where I'd have hit it hard," the plummy-voiced Welshman said, adding: "I didn't think I could learn anything about comedy -- I'd done all of Shakespeare's. But from him I learned."
Born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky in 1931 Berlin and, for a few key years, Chicago-trained at the Compass Players in the pre-Second City era, Nichols died Wednesday at 83, of cardiac arrest. He is survived by his fourth wife, veteran TV anchor Diane Sawyer, to whom he had been married since 1988; a son; and two daughters.
That old promotional ballyhoo line "star of stage and screen!" rarely applied to an offstage or off-camera personality. Like Elia Kazan (whose premiere production of "A Streetcar Named Desire" changed his life, he later said), Nichols was a directorial superstar. He staged the original productions of everything from "The Odd Couple" to "Annie." Two enormous hits among many, and I'm not even counting "Spamalot," the Monty Python musical that tried out, and succeeded, in Chicago a few years ago.
Actors adored him. They felt comfortably challenged by his methods, and inspired by his way of breaking down cosmically difficult matters of interpretion into a series of winnable wars for the performer, and satisfaction for the audience.
By Thursday morning the tributes came in a flood from an astonishing variety of his screen and stage colleagues (Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks) and from hundreds more, on Twitter or Facebook, who simply admired his work.
Many will always prize Nichols' second film, "The Graduate" (1967), above the rest, and they will remember it best for a single deadpan exchange. Nichols cast then-unknown Dustin Hoffman over Robert Redford and several other movie-looking guys as the disaffected Benjamin. Benjamin has just been cornered by one of Benjamin's parents' friends out by the swimming pool.
Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you. Just one word.
Benjamin: Yes, sir.
Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?
Benjamin: Yes, I am.
Mr. McGuire: Plastics.
(Pause)
(Pause)
Benjamin, expressionless: "Exactly how do you mean?"
I suspect Nichols had a hand in determining the precise duration of that second pause. Inarguably he knew he should hold the shot, rather than cut for emphasis. He let that famous dialogue breathe and build, sneakily, in a single take. The talk may have been about plastics, but at its keenest Nichols' work was about getting past the synthetic surface of our lives, to locate (as the Tom Stoppard play he directed on Broadway was called) the real thing.
Nichols's father was a Russian Jewish doctor, married to a German Jew. At age 4 Nichols lost all his body hair, for good, owing to a reaction to a whooping-cough vaccination. The shy war refugee and his younger brother arrived in New York in 1939 with their father. When he arrived, Nichols often noted, he knew two sentences in the language of his adopted country: "I do not speak English" and "Please do not kiss me."
His Chicago years began in the early 1950s at the University of Chicago, where Nichols found his first real friends and a sense of belonging. As he told one interviewer: At last, "happy and neurotic." In John Lahr's 2000 New Yorker profile of Nichols, the future director's college roommate, publisher Aaron Asher, spoke of the campus paradise they found among their fellow budding intellectuals and artists. "We were all freaks," Asher said. "There was sex. There was dope. There was a subculture."
And there was improvisation. Nichols claimed to hate it; what he loved, making $28 a week for the Compass Players, was writing material that suited his imperious, insecure qualities, and that set up his partner, Elaine May, for another chance to soar. The comedy team of Nichols and May became a seminal duo in American culture, paving the way for a bracing, off-center collection of observational humorists.
During his University of Chicago days, Nichols began directing as well, staging William Butler Yeats' curtain-raiser "Purgatory" as a showcase for fellow student, sometime roommate and future Lou Grant, Ed Asner. Decades later Nichols cited Preston Sturges among his favorite film directors, for his sweet-and-sour vision of American life and his teeming, chaotic comic ensembles.
Here is where a Nichols appreciation gets tricky. As with many directors, there was much to not appreciate. A lot of Nichols' work on screen is tasteful, classy, carefully wrought and a bit dull, especially with dull material. His visual approach to filmmaking could be self-effacing to a fault.
Yet on film and television, over and over, he revealed an intelligent populist touch with a wide range of stories, much of it derived from his other love, the stage. In addition to "Virginia Woolf," Nichols' directorial resume included such stage-to-screen adaptations as Neil Simon's "Biloxi Blues"; "The Birdcage," taken from the hit French farce; "Closer"; and for HBO, the two-part "Angels in America" and "Wit," faithfully and movingly adapted from the Pulitzer Prize-winning plays by Tony Kushner and Margaret Edson, respectively.
In "Angels" and especially "Wit," Nichols reasserted his skillful way with terrific actors. He respected the gravity but also the levity in those scripts. Back when he was making his Broadway name with "Barefoot in the Park," in rehearsals he reminded the actors: Don't play for the laughs. Play it for keeps, for real. Play it like the situation matters, and means something. The laughs will come.
Nichols' final big-screen project, "Charlie Wilson's War," came in 2007. In a 2006 interview with the Directors Guild of America magazine, he explained why he liked making movies. "Life," he said, "is difficult and f--- up and complicated. The cutting room isn't." In the same interview he spoke of his admiration for his design colleagues. Working on "Virginia Woolf" he recalled mentioning in a pre-production meeting that he knew "this couple at the University of Chicago and they had bookshelves made out of board and bricks." The designers took it from there. The detail, the memory, was an honest one, and it made sense, and it made it into the movie.
Nichols always characterized his '50s Chicago years as crucial, even life-saving, even though he yearned to make it bigger elsewhere. At the end of the 20th Century he told the New Yorker's John Lahr: "Chicago is not a city of fashion, nor is it full of pride and excitement over its art. They were very calm about Compass. They came. They laughed. They went home."
And yet, Nichols' sane, practical, gently inquisitive approach to his craft had something of that Chicago in it.
In directing, he found the role he was meant to play: that of a temporary father of a band of players, one play or movie at a time. He could treat people harshly, dismissively. On Thursday frequent collaborator Streep (with whom Nichols was planning a new version of the Terrence McNally play "Master Class" for HBO) noted that his temper was occasonally fearsome. But Streep said Nichols' fourth wife, veteran broadcaster Sawyer, brought out a mellower strain in his personality. "Because nobody can fight back," he once said, "the director has an absolute obligation to treat people decently." By leveling an even gaze at the characters before him, he won the Oscar, the Emmy, the Grammy and too many other prizes to count. Nichols won nine Tony Awards. At 7:45 p.m. New York time Friday, Broadway will dim its lights in his honor.
mjphillips@tribune.com
Twitter @phillipstribune
