Mike Nichols
Mike Nichols
Mike Nicholswas a German-American film and theatre director, producer, actor and comedian. He was noted for his ability to work across a range of genres and an aptitude for getting the best out of actors regardless of their acting experience. Nichols began his career in the 1950s with the comedy improvisational troupe, The Compass Players, predecessor of The Second City, in Chicago. He then teamed up with his improv partner, Elaine May, to form the comedy duo Nichols and May...
NationalityGerman
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth6 November 1931
CityBerlin, Germany
CountryGermany
We've all heard those fatal words in a relationship where someone says, 'Just tell me. I promise I won't be mad. I just want the answer,' ... Clive Owen asks his wife that question in 'Closer,' but he really doesn't want the answer because it's just a slide into great pain.
Whether something is a success or not has never had much to do with what you do next.
Clay Aiken is amazing beyond that glorious voice. Turns out he is an excellent comic actor and a master of character.
I had a high school girlfriend whose mother gave us theater tickets, so I saw the second night performance of 'A Streetcar Named Desire.' My girl and I could not get up during intermission, we were so stunned. To this day it's the only thing I've seen on stage that's 100 percent real and 100 percent poetic simultaneously.
Chicago is not a very fashion-driven place. Nobody says, 'Oh, you've got to come see these fabulous people!' Nobody cares.
I'm an enormous fan of 'The West Wing.' It was one of the very few shows I would watch every week.
If you're fleeing Nazi Germany in 1939 and you're a Jew, you don't think so much about relationships. People didn't have a lot of divorces during the Holocaust, for instance.
If you lose a parent, it never goes away. As a kid, I dreamed about my father coming back for 15 or 20 years. I still do sometimes.
The reason you do this stuff - comedy, plays, movies - is to be seized by something, to disappear in the service of an idea.
With a preliminary look at the budget, I don't see how to fund the debt service fund. The debt service will be in the hole next year. And number two, there's the school capital budget.
I've learned that many of the worst things lead to the best things, that no great thing is achieved without a couple of bad, bad things on the way to them, and that the bad things that happen to you bring, in some cases, the good things.
In a weird way, when I was looking back, I didn't know I was going to be a director until I was.
I think that to make something alive, instead of on a page, is an honorable task. And it turns me on.
The whole point about laughter is it's like mercury: you can't catch it, you can't catch what motivates it - that's why it's funny.