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Charles Grodin, one of cinema’s most-accomplished comic actors — and most-beloved curmudgeons — has passed away at the age of 86. A collaborator of Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, Neil Simon and Buck Henry and the neurotic scene partner of Robert DeNiro in “Midnight Run,” Grodin’s career spanned six decades,…
‘I see my tiger robe on television,” my mother says to me on the phone. “What am I watching?” I pause for a split second to think. I’m about 1,300 miles away from her. But I know: “The Birdcage.” My mother chuckles. She’s talking about the scene in the now iconic 1996 comedy where Robin…
This article was first published in the February 26, 2010 issue of the Forward. On the celebrity family tree, a Jewish film director has been revealed as the missing link among Albert Einstein, Meryl Streep and TV’s Dr. Mehmet Oz. Mike Nichols, the Oscar-winning director of the 1967 film “The Graduate,” learned that he shared…
Born Mikhail Peschkowsky in Berlin, Mike Nichols went on to become one of the greatest forces in American comedy and film. An early member of Chicago’s Compass Players, which went on to become Second City, one half of Nichols and May, director of “The Graduate,” “Catch 22,” and most recently “Charlie Wilson’s War,” Nichols has…
(Reuters) — Few directors have moved between Broadway and Hollywood as easily as Mike Nichols. Here are six facts about Nichols, who died on Wednesday. 1) A bad reaction to a whooping-cough vaccine at age 4 left Nichols permanently hairless, according to the New Yorker magazine. Later he would come to rely on wigs and…
(Reuters) — Mike Nichols, a nine-time Tony Award winner on Broadway and the Oscar-winning director of films such as “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf,” “The Graduate” and “Carnal Knowledge,” died on Wednesday at age 83, ABC News said. The prolific director passed away at his home of cardiac arrest, his spokeswoman said. A private service…
What if Tatooine were a warped version of 1960s suburban California, Aunt Beru was Mrs. Robinson, and Luke Skywalker just a blonder Benjamin Braddock? Replace John Williams’s Darth Vader theme with Simon and Garfunkle, and my guess is, it would look something like this. Enjoy your trip to Scarborough Fair. Via land speeder, that is….
Mike Nichols is to Simon & Garfunkel as Yoko Ono is to The Beatles. Art Garfunkel revealed at a recent panel discussion in New York that when the film director hired the duo to act in his 1970 film version of Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” — but then dropped Simon from the project — he did…
