Mike Nichols

Before he made the films Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and The Graduate, Mike Nichols had directed four hit plays running simultaneously on Broadway. And before that he’d been one half, with Elaine May, of the acclaimed comic duo, Nichols and May. He followed The Graduate with another hit film, Carnal Knowledge before, as all the ghouls waiting to rip a success to shreds would shriek, hitting the skids and failure with Catch-22 and Day of the Dolphin. (Both films I happen to love.)

But he didn’t stop. He moved on, directing films and plays right up to his death in 2014. Some flopped (The Fortune, Regarding Henry), others didn’t (Silkwood, Working Girl, The Birdcage).* 

The thing is, he kept working, bringing at his best a touch of polished class and impeccable timing to comedies and dramas that were very much Mike Nichols productions. And the thing I loved about this book is that while it’s recording the ups and downs and travails of all these projects – Mark Harris seems to have interviewed everybody involved in each one except a couple of random passers-by who stopped to ask directions on the set one day -  he also manages to focus on the man behind the work.

So what you get is fully rounded portrait of an enormously talented, supremely confident, insecure, sometimes arrogant, temporarily drug-addicted, non-stop smoker with a dazzling wit who could more often than not get the best out of everyone he ever worked with.

And it’s written in a style that rejects the usual episodic Then he did this, and Then he did that and Then he followed it up with the other style of so many show-business biographies. Clunk clunk clunk. What you get is a book written almost as a novel, moving from the personal to the professional and back again, with little cliff-hanger chapter endings that keep you reading just one more…

One of the best biographies I’ve ever read.

*Can’t comment on his theatrical work, since I never saw any of them. Unfortunately.