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Mike Nichols : a life / Mark Harris.

by Harris, Mark, 1963-

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Penguin Press, 2021.

791.430233 N616h

Motion picture producers and directors -- United States -- Biography.

9780399562242 (hc.)

xiii, 673 p. : col. ill.; 25 cm.

Includes bibliographical references (pages [601]-650) and index.

"Mike Nichols burst onto the scene as a wunderkind without parallel: while still in his 20's, he was half of a lucrative hit improv duo with Elaine May that was the talk of the country. Next he directed four hit Broadway plays, picking up the Best Director Tony for three of them, and by his mid-30's the first two films he directed, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Graduate, were the highest-grossing movies of 1966 and 1967 respectively, and The Graduate had won him an Oscar for Best Director. Well before his 40th birthday, Nichols lived in a sprawling penthouse on Central Park West, drove a Rolls Royce, collected Arabian horses, and counted the likes of Jacqueline Kennedy, Stephen Sondheim, Richard Avedon and the Aga Khan as good friends. Where he had arrived is even more astonishing given where he began: born Igor Peschkowsky to a Jewish couple in Berlin in 1931, he and his younger brother were sent alone to America on a ship in 1939. Their father, who had gone ahead to find work, was waiting for them; their mother would follow, in the nick of time. His name changed by his father to "Michael Nichols," the young boy caught very few breaks: his parents were now destitute, and his father died when Mike was just 11, leaving his mentally unstable mother alone and overwhelmed. The gulf between these two sets of facts explains a great deal about Nichols's transformation from lonely outsider to the center of more than one cultural universe -- the acute powers of observation that first made him famous; the nourishment he drew from his creative partnerships, most enduringly with May; his unquenchable drive; his hunger for security and status; and the depressions and self-medications that brought him to terrible lows. It would take decades for him to come to grips with his demons. In an incomparable portrait that follows Nichols from Berlin to New York to Chicago to Hollywood, Mark Harris explores, with brilliantly vivid detail and insight, the life, work, struggle, and passion of an artist and man in constant motion. Among the 250 people Harris interviewed: Elaine May, Meryl Streep, Stephen Sondheim, Robert Redford, Glenn Close, Tom Hanks, Candice Bergen, Emma Thompson, Annette Bening, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Lorne Michaels, and Gloria Steinem. Mark Harris gives an intimate and evenhanded accounting of success and failure alike; the portrait is not always flattering, but its ultimate impact is to present the full story of one of the most richly interesting, complicated, and consequential figures the worlds of theater and motion pictures have ever seen. It is a triumph of the biographer's art."--From publisher.

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