By Tadeniawo Collins
Veteran award-winning director, Mike Nichols has died at the age of 83.
The director’s death was confirmed by ABC News President, James Goldston today, Thursday, November 20, 2014, who disclosed that Nichols died yesterday evening.
‘The family will hold a private service this week; a memorial will be held at a later date,’ Goldston said.
A director of matchless versatility who brought fierce wit, caustic social commentary and wicked absurdity to such film, TV and stage hits as The Graduate, Angels in America and Monty Python’s Spamalot, Nichols won directing Emmys for both Angels in America and Wit, and disclosed that he liked stories about the real lives of real people and that humour inevitably pervades even the bleakest of such tales.
During a career spanning more than 50 years, Nichols, who was married to ABC’s Diane Sawyer, managed to be both an insider and outsider, an occasional White House guest and friend to countless celebrities who was as likely to satirize the elite as he was to mingle with them. A former stand-up performer who began his career in a groundbreaking comedy duo with Elaine May and whose work brought him an Academy Award, a Grammy and multiple Tony and Emmy honors, Nichols had a remarkable gift for mixing edgy humor and dusky drama.
Born Michael Igor Peschkowsky on Nov. 6, 1931, in Berlin, Nichols fled Nazi Germany for America at age 7 with his family. He recalled to the AP 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.’
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.’
Divorced three times, Nichols married TV journalist, Diane Sawyer in 1988.
