Mike Nichols (1931-2014)

I'm not ready for this one.  As many of you are aware, legendary director and producer Mike Nichols passed away Thursday.  Nichols, though 83, was not what you'd generally consider a celebrity that you were expecting to die soon, and I think that's because he always seemed so "on."  Nichols, beloved by those that collaborated with him, frequently found himself handing out life achievement awards (or receiving them) and always had a verve about him.  It wasn't just that he was witty-there was such a feeling in his cleverness, and the way that he seemed brimming with joy and love for those around him.  Optimism and bliss are rare gifts in life, and Nichols publicly (and from what his friends and family have stated about him, clearly privately) knew how to emanate those like few others.

My first experience with Nichols was probably Regarding Henry, his 1991 film starring Harrison Ford and one of those first films to introduce the world to Annette Bening.  It was one of my mom's favorite movies, and it sat there on top of our entertainment center in our living room growing up, staring down at me with Indiana Jones' soulful eyes.

The first experience I ever had with Nichols that was truly seismic in terms of my movie-watching, however, would have to have been Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.  People frequently ask me what was the film that made me fall in love with the movies, and for the large part that would be A Streetcar Named Desire, but Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf was a profound effect as well, as I saw them basically back-to-back.  Both films showed me actors exploring new chasms of feeling and performance.  It is not a mistake that the first movies that I fell in love with were heavily reliant on a future love, that of theater, and of course Mike Nichols was one of the few directors who could truly meld the two.  The films he adapted to be plays, ranging from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf to Angels in America to the wildly-underrated Closer always felt like they existed in the cinematic world.  So often stage directors don't know how to adapt to their new medium while still keeping within the confines of the actual staged work, but Nichols, Man of a Thousand Tonys, was not someone who suffered in that regard.

For those who see Nichols name and think instantly of a couple of movies like Who's Afraid or The Graduate or (my brother's personal favorite) Silkwood, there was something else truly special about Mike and his approach to the cinema: the way that he could find actors and bring out the best in them.  Frequently referred to by the enviable moniker "an actor's director," Nichols could both reinvent an actor and in many cases discover one.  For those of you who casually love movies but may not know who Nichols is, rest comfortably in knowing that he has vastly influenced your filmic viewing through the years even if you've never seen one of his pictures.  People like Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman, and Whoopi Goldberg were discovered or entered superstardom as a result of Nichols' influence, and other actors had their public personas vastly changed as a result of his tutelage.  Nichols managed to take Meryl Streep out of period dramas and into grittier, more realistic work, which vastly shaped the way she was seen in the 1980's.  He brought Elizabeth Taylor out of her gorgeous glamour mode and gave us the grittiest, finest performance of her long career.  He transformed Cher from being a singer and host of a silly variety show to being an acclaimed movie star.  Actors ranging from Jack Nicholson to Melanie Griffith to John Travolta to Julia Roberts have seen their careers dramatically shifted by his steady influence, bringing on a new chapter in their artistry.  Nichols was one of the last directors who, like Elia Kazan and William Wyler, clearly was focused on specific performances in the film as they related to the overall picture; he brought that theatrical sensibility to the screen in a way that few modern directors have been able to muster.  He was that rare artist who cared both about every project that came his way (his films and plays rarely offered us something uninteresting, and oftentimes offered us something profound and life-changing) and had a sense of legacy.  His works live on in the hearts of anyone who has ever loved a performance or had their perception of an artist change.  He was an actor's director, of course, but he was, thankfully for all of us, also an audience's director as well.