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Ladybbird · 20-11-14, 16:14

Oscar-Winning Director Mike Nichols Dies Suddenly of a Heart Attack:
-Mastermind of 'The Graduate' and Husband of Diane Sawyer Dead at 83

The director was the visionary behind such classics as The Graduate, The Birdcage and Working Girl
Nichols was one of only 12 people to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and a Tony Award
He was currently in the midst of a new TV project, adapting Terrence McNally's play about opera legend Maria Callas
He had been married since 1988 to TV news anchor Diane Sawyer who he called the 'perfect wife' who brought him 'ultimate happiness'
From the moment she met him, during a chance encounter in Paris in 1986, Sawyer said 'he was the center of the dance'
Born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in 1931, in Berlin, Nichols fled Nazi Germany for America at age seven with his family
A private family service to be held this week with a memorial at a later date

Daily Mail UK, 20 November 2014

Renowned director Mike Nichols died suddenly on Wednesday of a heart attack at the age of 83. The director brought fierce wit, caustic social commentary and wicked absurdity to classics such as The Graduate, The Birdcage, Angels in America and for the stage, Monty Python's Spamalot, in a career that spanned six decades.

His directorial golden touch led him to be one of only 12 people to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and numerous Tony Awards.

Nichols was married for more than 25 years to TV news anchor Diane Sawyer who he said gave him 'ultimate happiness'. Nichols had been married three times when he met news anchor Diane Sawyer in the late Eighties.

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Renowned director Mike Nichols, pictured with his wife, news anchor Diane Sawyer, at a party in New York City on November 10. He passed away suddenly on Wednesday night after suffering a heart attack

Film director Mike Nichols, pictured in 1967, while directing his classic movie The Graduate. The film won him an Oscar for Best Director

Diane Sawyer and Mike Nichols pictured at a party in New York City in 1991. She said that 'he was the center of the dance' and he called her his 'ultimate happiness'

Mike Nichols and wife Diane Sawyer appearing in NY;

The death was confirmed by ABC News President James Goldston on Thursday.

Mr Goldston said the family were holding a small private service this week with a memorial to be scheduled for a later date.

'He was a true visionary, winning the highest honors in the arts for his work as a director, writer, producer and comic and was one of a tiny few to win the EGOT - an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony in his lifetime,' Goldston wrote in an email announcing Nichols' death.
'No one was more passionate than Mike.'

The visionary director had never stopped working throughout his long career and was in the middle of a new project for HBO, adapting Terrence McNally's Tony Award-winning play about opera legend Maria Callas.
Nichols had been married three times when he met news anchor Diane Sawyer in the late Eighties.
He was 54 and Sawyer, then a 60 Minutes correspondent, was 41. They first met in 1986 in a Concorde lounge at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.
Sawyer said of that chance encounter, that she knew instantly 'that my life was changing', and that 'he was the center of the dance'.

Quote:

'A TRULY GOOD MAN': STARS PAY TRIBUTE TO MIKE NICHOLS

Kevin Spacey: 'Mike Nichols gave me my start. A mentor, friend, colleague. One of the best observers of life. My thoughts are with Diane & his children.'

Christiane Amanpour: ‘We mourn the loss of a great, great artist, and a good man. Condolences to Diane Sawyer and his family.’

Katie Couric: 'So sad to learn of the death of Mike Nichols. My heart goes out to Diane, their families & everyone who marveled in his brilliance.'

Mia Farrow: 'Funniest, smartest, most generous, wisest, kindest of all. Mike Nichols, a truly good man.'
Jeremy Piven: 'The great Mike Nichols is gone, he gave us so much brilliant work it's staggering. We were so lucky to have him, his legacy will live on
Al Roker: 'Thoughts and prayers to @DianeSawyer on the passing of her husband, legendary actor/producer/director Mike Nichols.'

George Stephanopoulos: 'Celebrating Mike Nichols-extraordinary funny & wise man- Tom Stoppard said it:“the best of America” Our thoughts w/ @dianesawyer &his family

Josh Elliott: 'RIP Mike Nichols. ‘Thoughts and prayers are with you, @DianeSawyer, in memory of your beloved’
Actor Ralph Macchio: 'Mike Nichols - legendary storyteller, iconic director, RIP. So many brilliant pieces of his stage and screen legacy. Too many to list'

Lizz Winstead, co-creator of The Daily Show: 'RIP Mike Nichols. A comedy genius and a legendary director'
Scandal star Tony Goldwyn: 'RIP #MikeNichols What a gigantic loss!!! The greatest of the great'

The couple married in April 1988 on Martha's Vineyard at their second home where they spent time when not at their Upper East Side Manhattan apartment.
Nichols said: 'My ultimate happiness began in 1988 when I married Diane. She is the perfect wife'.

Before meeting Sawyer, Nichols was first married to Patricia Scott from 1957 to 1960.

He went on to wed Margo Callas from 1963 to 1974 and had one daughter, Daisy Nichols. He then married Annabel Davis-Goff and had two children, Max Nichols and Jenny Nichols.

He is survived by his wife, three children and four grandchildren.

The director was born in Berlin but came to the U.S. as a child to escape the Nazi Germany. His father set up a successful medical practice in New York and the family settled near Central Park.
Nichols began a pre-med program at the University of Chicago but began skipping classes to become more deeply involved with the theater.
At the University, he made his debut as a director with a theatrical performance of W.B. Yeats' Purgatory.

In 1954, he left the University of Chicago for New York City where he was accepted into the Actors Studio to study under Lee Strasberg.
He won an Academy Award and a Golden Globe for Best Director for his 1967 movie The Graduate starring Dustin Hoffman.
The director was also nominated for Oscars for Working Girl, The Remains of the Day, Silkwood and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

His last film was 2007's Charlie Wilson's War which starred Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts.

His golden touch also extended to the stage where he put on Tony-Award winning productions of plays Barefoot in the Park, The Odd Couple, The Real Thing, Death of a Salesman along with musicals Spamalot and Annie.
He began his showbusiness career as a stand-up performer who started out in a groundbreaking comedy duo with Elaine May.

His 1966 film directing debut, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, unforgettably captured the vicious yet sparkling and sly dialogue of Edward Albee's play, as a couple (Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor) torment each other over deep-seated guilt and resentment.

Angels in America, the 2003 TV miniseries adapted from the stage sensation, blended rich pathos and whimsy in its portrait of people coping with AIDS and looking to the heavens for compassion that they found lacking in Ronald Reagan's 1980s America.

Similarly, Nichols' 2001 TV adaptation of the play Wit packed biting levity within the stark story of a college professor dying of ovarian cancer.
Nichols, who won directing Emmys for both Angels in America and Wit, said he liked stories about the real lives of real people and that humor inevitably pervades even the bleakest of such tales.

I have never understood people dividing things into dramas and comedies,' Nichols said in a 2004 interview.
'There are more laughs in 'Hamlet' than many Broadway comedies.'

He was a wealthy, educated man who often mocked those just like him, never more memorably than in The Graduate, which shot Dustin Hoffman to fame in the 1967 story of an earnest young man rebelling against his elders' expectations.
Nichols himself would say that he identified with Hoffman's awkward, perpetually flustered Benjamin Braddock.

Mixing farce and Oedipal drama, Nichols managed to capture a generation's discontent without ever mentioning Vietnam, civil rights or any other issues of the time.

Mike Nichols and Tom Hanks at the premiere of Charlie Wilson's War in which Hanks starred at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2007

Nichols in 1968 receiving his Academy Award for Best Director for The Graduate alongside Sidney Poitier

Famous friends: Throughout his long career, Nichols has made generations of Hollywood friends. Pictured in 2003 at the premiere of Angels In America with Emma Thompson and right, with Hugh Jackman at an event in 2012

But young people laughed hard when a family friend advised Benjamin that the road to success was paved with 'plastics' or at Benjamin's lament that he felt like life was 'some kind of game, but the rules don't make any sense to me. They're being made up by all the wrong people. I mean no one makes them up. They seem to make themselves up.'

Mike Nichols and daughter Jenny attend the Broadway Opening Night performance of Indian Ink on Broadway on September 30, 2014

At the time, Nichols was 'just trying to make a nice little movie,' he recalled in 2005 at a retrospective screening of The Graduate.
#l''It wasn't until when I saw it all put together that I realized this was something remarkable,' he said.

Nichols won the best-director Oscar for The Graduate, which co-starred Anne Bancroft as an aging temptress pursuing Hoffman, whose character responds with the celebrated line: 'Mrs. Robinson, you're trying to seduce me.'
He admitted in 2013 that many of his film and stage projects explored a familiar, naughty theme.

'I keep coming back to it, over and over — adultery and cheating,' he says. 'It's the most interesting problem in the theater. How else do you get Oedipus? That's the first cheating in the theater.'

Not just actors, but great actors, clamored to work with Nichols, who studied acting with Lee Strasberg and had an empathy that helped bring out the best from the talent he put in front of the camera.

Nichols often collaborated with Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson.
Other stars who worked with Nichols included Al Pacino (Angels in America), Gene Hackman and Robin Williams (The Birdcage), Harrison Ford, Melanie Griffith and Sigourney Weaver (Working Girl) and Julia Roberts (Closer).

In 2007, Nichols brought out Charlie Wilson's War, starring Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts.

Mike Nichols with Diane Sawyer, and his daughter Daisy at the 1998 premiere of his film Primary Colors in Los Angeles. The film starred John Travolta and Emma Thompson

Diane Sawyer, Mike Nichols with his children Max Nichols and Jenny Nichols in 1990 at an awards ceremony

Just as he moved easily among stage, screen and television, Nichols fearlessly switched from genre to genre.
Onstage, he tackled comedy (The Odd Couple), classics (Uncle Vanya) and musicals (The Apple Tree, Spamalot, the latter winning him his sixth Tony for directing).
On Broadway, he won nine Tonys, for directing the plays Barefoot in the Park (1964), Luv and The Odd Couple (1965), Plaza Suite (1968), 'The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1972), The Real Thing (1984), and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (2012).
He has also won in other categories, for directing the musical Monty Python's Spamalot (2005), and for producing Annie (1977) and The Real Thing (1984).

Comedy duo: Elaine May, Mike Nichols in 1958. Their Broadway show, An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May, earned them a Grammy for best comedy recording in 1961

Director Mike Nichols, actor George Segal, Elizabeth Taylor, and her husband, Richard Burton, smiling on the set of Nichols' film, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

'I think a director can make a play happen before your eyes so that you are part of it and it is part of you,' he said.
'If you can get it right, there's no mystery. It's not about mystery. It's not even mysterious. It's about our lives.'

Though known for films with a comic edge, Nichols branched into thrillers with Day of the Dolphin, horror with Wolf, and real-life drama with Silkwood.
Along with directing for television, he was an executive producer for the 1970s TV series Family.

Nichols' golden touch failed him on occasion with such duds as the anti-war satire Catch-22, with Alan Arkin in an adaptation of Joseph Heller's best-seller, and 'What Planet Are You From?', an unusually tame comedy for Nichols that starred Garry Shandling and Annette Bening.

Born Michael Igor Peschkowsky on November 6, 1931, in Berlin, Nichols fled Nazi Germany for America at age seven with his family.

He recalled in 1996 that at the time, he could say only two things in English: 'I don't speak English' and 'Please don't kiss me.'

He said he fell in love with the power of the stage at age 15 when the mother of his then-girlfriend gave them theater tickets to the second night of the debut of A Streetcar Named Desire starring Marlon Brando in 1947.
'We were poleaxed, stunned. We didn't speak to each other. We just sat like two half-unconscious people. It was so shocking. It was so alive. It was so real,' he said. 'I'm amazed about our bladders because we never went to the bathroom and it was about 3 1/2 or 4 hours long.'

Nichols attended the University of Chicago but left to study acting in New York. He returned to Chicago, where he began working with May in the Compass Players, a comedy troupe that later became the Second City.

Former First Lady Jackie Kennedy dated Mike Nichols herself. 'She was possessive. She didn't like him dating Diane,' according to a friend

Nichols directing the thriller Wolf in 1994 with Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer

May and Nichols developed their great improvisational rapport into a saucy, sophisticated stage show that took on sex, marriage, family and other subjects in a frank manner that titillated and startled audiences of the late 1950s and early '60s.

'People always thought we were making fun of other people when we were in fact making fun of ourselves,' Nichols said in 1997.
'We did teenagers in the back seat of the car and people committing adultery. Of course, you're making fun of yourself. You're making jokes about yourself. Who can you better observe?'

Their Broadway show, An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May, earned them a Grammy for best comedy recording in 1961.
The two split up soon after, though they reunited in the 1990s, with May writing screenplays for Nichols' 'Primary Colors' and 'The Birdcage,' adapted from the French farce 'La Cage aux Folles.'

After the break with May, Nichols found his true calling as a director, his early stage work highlighted by 'Barefoot in the Park,' ''The Odd Couple,' ''Plaza Suite' and 'The Prisoner of Second Avenue,' each of which earned him Tonys.

Other honors included Oscar nominations for directing 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?', 'Silkwood' and 'Working Girl,' a best-picture nomination for producing 'The Remains of the Day,' and a lifetime-achievement award from the Directors Guild of America in 2004.

Never one to analyze his career and look for common themes, Nichols would shrug off questions that sought to link his far-flung body of work.
'What I sort of think about is what Orson Welles told me, which is: Leave it to the other guys, the people whose whole job it is to do that, to make patterns and say what the thread is through your work and where you stand,' Nichols said in 1996. 'Let somebody else worry about what it means.'

Quote:

When Diane Sawyer met Mike Nichols he was hairless, hallucinating and addicted to Halcion sleeping pills. But she knew right away he was her 'center of the dance,' a salty new book on newswomen in TV reveals

November 20, 2014: With the news of Mike Nichols death, the MailOnline is re-running this article originally published in September

Diane Sawyer and Mike Nichols in 1995. They had a chance encounter in Paris in 1986 and married two years later in Martha's Vineyard

When Diane Sawyer met Mike Nichols, the Oscar, Grammy and five-time Tony winning director was a drug addict, hooked on the sleeping pill Halcion, and floating in a black depression.
He was having a nervous breakdown and lost in ‘Halcion madness’ with thoughts of going crazy, losing all his money and dying.

For that brief moment in time in 1986, when they first met in a Concorde lounge at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, they professed to be each other’s hero and it was profound love at first sight for both the Ice Princess and the Golden boy.
He was fifty-four and Sawyer, then a 60 Minutes correspondent, was forty-one. They were swept up into each other’s universe within moments, made a lunch date that confirmed their affection.

But then Nichols disappeared.

Diane was in disbelief and hurt. She had achieved so many of her ambitious dreams but now it seemed like the most desired dream of all had evaporated and she had no control, reveals a sensational new book, The News Sorority: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour – and the (Ongoing, Imperfect, Complicated) Triumph of Women in TV News by Sheila Weller, published by Penguin Press.

Mike Nichols didn’t want Diane to see his madness. ‘I didn’t want her to see me as I was. I went totally crazy. As soon as I was okay, I called her up’, the author quotes Nichols.

The director had been introduced to the medication that is used to treat insomnia while in the hospital for a minor heart procedure. He was quickly addicted and then his world began to fall apart.
Hallucinating that he was losing all his money, he began selling his prize collection of Polish Arabian horses he kept on a farm in Bridgewater, Connecticut.

Diane was the impetus for Nichols getting help.

He had another bombshell secret to confess. He was left permanently hairless after a botched whooping cough vaccination at age four. He’s always worn a wig, fake eyebrows almost his entire life. There is not a hair on his body.

One of the first things Nichols did was break up with an unnamed media professional he had been involved with for two years after his third divorce.
At the time, Diane was living with Richard Holbrooke, a former assistant Secretary of State for Asia who was an investment banker with Lehman Brothers.
With an impressive Foreign Service career, Holbrooke was a ‘superbly connected high achiever’ as well as being Diane’s ‘primary guidance counselor’, writes Weller.
He was shocked and devastated by his sweetheart’s sudden decision to move into her own unfurnished apartment. She owned no furniture, bought no furniture.

‘I have no taste’, Sawyer admitted. ‘When I’ve had the option of going to a movie or looking at [furniture fabric] swatches, that wasn’t even close. I’d rather send out for pizza and sit on my floor pillows’.

Nichols, the director of such iconic films as The Graduate, Carnal Knowledge and Working Girl, was shocked by her style of living at the height of her glamour and success.
But that all changed when the couple moved into a Park Avenue hotel penthouse apartment. Nichols took care of furnishing it with an exquisite collection of art and furniture while ‘Diane stayed proudly un-domestic for years, leaving niceties to Mike.
She learned how to cook --- in a way. She cut out multiple versions of a recipe and they sometimes cooked together but it wasn’t something she had a desire to master. Twenty-eight years later, she is now the vegetable police making sure Nichols eats well.

The couple married in April 1988 on Martha’s Vineyard where they have a second home when not in residence at their Upper East Side Manhattan apartment.

‘My ultimate happiness began in 1988 when I married Diane. She is the perfect wife’.

Always asked why she didn't have children, Diane responded that she would have had them under different circumstances ‘but I chose Mike and Mike already had three children with two other women, and he was fifty-eight when we married'

It was the director’s fourth marriage.

‘In the first ninety seconds’ of meeting the iconic director in the airport lounge, she knew ‘that my life was changing’, and that ‘he was the center of the dance’.

But she wasn’t considered the perfect wife for Nichols by his erudite theatre friends. ‘The arts circle thought that Diane was not up to Mike and they still feel that way’, Weller quotes a long-time friend of Nichols.

Add Jackie Onassis to that list of disapprovers. ‘Mike was a love of her life. Jackie was very covetous of Mike. She was possessive. She didn’t like him dating Diane,' according to a friend.

Lila Diane Sawyer was born in Glasgow, Kentucky, in December 1945 but the family soon moved to Louisville, where the little girl was enrolled in talent classes at an early age to prep for future beauty pageants staked out for her by her mother.
She captured the crown for America’s Junior Miss in her senior year at Seneca High as well as ‘most likely to succeed’, which she viewed as embarrassing. But the Junior Miss title won her a cash prize that allowed her to pay tuition at Wellesley College, an elite, liberal women's college in Massachusetts.

It was a major transition into a sophisticated arena for the 5’9” southern blonde. In the 1970s, she worked for the Nixon Administration and after the president’s disgraced resignation in 1974 following the Watergate scandal, she headed out to his hometown in San Clemente, California, to help him research and write his memoirs.
Media liberals in New York had a hard time coming to terms with her loyalty to Nixon in the early years.

Diane’s work ethic and successful lifestyle infuriated Barbara Walters who referred to Sawyer as ‘That Girl’. Diane was always one step ahead in booking wars for the big-get interviews. Barbara put in her request only to find out that Diane had already requested that person.

Barbara talked about Mike Nichols. ‘I don’t have a husband who’s a Hollywood director! I don’t have what she has! That Girl can book everybody! I don’t have these dinner parties. I don’t go to Martha’s Vineyard. I don’t even have a house’.

But it was an exaggeration because Barbara had her own ‘axis of connections’ and at one time had been married to Merv Adelson, one of Hollywood’s most successful network television show producers.

‘There was a New York media elite, and Barbara always felt like an outsider, and that feeling is what drove her’. Diane was in the media elite with a style so different from Walters. She was part of the team and willing to go to the edit room and work with the producer on a script.
Diane learned how to juggle her two worlds – ‘the sweatpants and Nellie Bly stories in the office, the sophisticated evenings with Mike and his friends, sometimes with campy repartee’.

This was Diane’s element.

She could be working up until midnight in the editing room, eating plastic-bagged okra, collard greens and salty potato chips – Southern comfort snack food. A quick trip to the bathroom, she’d emerge in fresh makeup and high heels to go home to her husband.

They became a media power couple. If a high profile friend of Diane’s was being pursued by Katie Couric for an interview, Mike Nichols picked up the phone and told their friend ‘that he and Diane would essentially cut off all social contact if they appeared on Today’ with Couric, the author claims.

Always asked why she didn’t have children, Diane responded that she would have had them under different circumstances ‘but I chose Mike and Mike already had three children with two other women, and he was fifty-eight when we married. And I chose him’. ‘He is my only marriage’.

The spark in their love affair has not diminished. She admits he is more romantic that she is. ‘He puts little notes in my sock drawer or in my suitcase before I leave for a work trip.
'I think one of the most romantic things is simply the way he reaches for my hand all the time’.

‘We rarely fight and I remember once when we were arguing he stopped in the middle of it and said, ‘Well, this is sort of fun, too’. And it was!
'It was good to know that we could get out our strong feelings but that we were indestructible at the same time’.

‘Falling in love really does have a sort of going-over-to-the other-side feeling to it. Giving something up. Dying. Giving up balance, equilibrium, some kind of safety, and just sliding through this unknown and slightly terrifying country, where you become unnervingly like the enemy’, Weller quotes Nichols. ’The other side. Just belonging to somebody: the end of all games’.
‘I had loved other women before but not like this’.

The News Sorority: Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric, Christiane Amanpour – and the (Ongoing, Imperfect, Complicated) Triumph of Women in TV News by Sheila Weller, published by Penguin Press is available on Amazon September 30
By CAROLINE HOWE FOR MAILONLINE

Mike Nichols Dies Aged 83 ;

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