NEW YORK: Mike Nichols, the director of such classic films as ‘Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf’, ‘The Graduate’ and ‘Carnal Knowledge’, died on Wednesday at age 83.

No director ever moved between Broadway and Hollywood as easily as Nichols and he was one of the few people to win Oscar, Tony, Emmy and Grammy awards.

Mike Nichols, whose career first blossomed with a comedy partnership with Elaine May in the late 1950s, was married to Diane Sawyer, former anchorwoman of ABC’s “World News Tonight” broadcast.

In a triumphant career that spanned over six decades, Mike Nichols created some of the most iconic works of American film, television and theatre.

He was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin, where his parents had settled after leaving Russia. He came to the United States at age seven when his family fled the Nazis in 1939.

He grew up in New York feeling like an outsider because of his limited English and odd appearance - a reaction to a whooping-cough vaccine had caused permanent hair loss. As a University of Chicago student, he fought depression but found like-minded friends such as May.

Nichols told the New York Times in an interview that when he came to the United States from Germany in 1939 at age seven, he could speak only two English sentences: “I do not know English” and “Please, don’t kiss me”.

Published in Dawn, November 21st, 2014