Picture a seven-year-old boy stepping off a ship in New York Harbor on April 28, 1939. He has his three-year-old brother beside him. He has no parents with him. And he knows exactly two sentences in English.
The first: “I do not speak English.” The second: “Please do not kiss me.”
That boy was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin on November 6, 1931. He would have turned 95 this week. You almost certainly know him by the name he took later in life: Mike Nichols, the man who directed The Graduate, won nine Tony Awards, and became one of the very few people in history to earn an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony.
Mike and his brother Robert were put on one of the last refugee boats out of Nazi Germany. Their father, a Russian-born doctor named Pavel Peschkowsky, had already gone ahead to New York the year before and renamed himself Paul Nichols. Their mother, Brigitte, escaped separately through Italy in 1940.
According to Do You Remember, the family had a remarkable history. Brigitte’s parents were the anarchist writer Gustav Landauer and the poet Hedwig Lachmann. The PBS series Faces of America confirmed a family legend that Albert Einstein was a distant cousin.
The early years in America were not easy. Around age four, a reaction to a whooping cough vaccine had left him unable to grow hair. He wore wigs and false eyebrows for the rest of his life. Then, when Mike was about 12, his father died of leukemia in 1944.
A bald boy with a German accent learned to survive by watching people very closely. As his biographer Mark Harris told CBS News, “He had a childhood reaction to a vaccine that resulted in the loss of all of his hair.” That outsider’s eye would become his greatest professional gift.
The Comedy Partnership That Changed Everything
At the University of Chicago, Nichols found someone who seemed to think exactly the way he did. Elaine May was sharp, strange, and fearless. Together they created a style of improvised sketch comedy that America had never quite heard before.
Their two-person show, An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, opened on Broadway on October 8, 1960, and ran for 306 performances, according to the Internet Broadway Database. Their comedy album won a Grammy.
Then, at the peak of their success in 1961, they stopped. The partnership ended almost as suddenly as it had begun. Nichols found himself on his own and made a move that surprised everyone. He started directing other actors.
He turned out to be a natural. He won his first Tony for directing Barefoot in the Park in 1964. His first film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starred Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. His second film, The Graduate, won him the Oscar for Best Director in 1968. The Emmys came decades later (for Wit in 2001 and Angels in America in 2004), completing the rare EGOT.
He always said that being an outsider was the real engine behind everything. “The thing about being an outsider, no matter what, is that there’s a good part, which is that it teaches you to hear what people are thinking,” he told NPR in 2012.
The Woman He Met While Waiting for a Flight
For all his professional success, Nichols had been married three times before the moment that changed the rest of his life. In 1986, he was sitting in an airport lounge in Paris, waiting for the Concorde back to New York, when he struck up a conversation with Diane Sawyer of 60 Minutes.
They married on April 29, 1988. Sawyer later described him as “generous and adventurous and a little wild and utterly kind,” in an interview with People. They stayed together for the rest of his life, 26 years.
Mike Nichols died suddenly of a heart attack at home in Manhattan on November 19, 2014. He was 83. He left behind Diane, three children, Daisy, Max, and Jenny and four grandchildren. ABC News president James Goldston announced that he had “passed away suddenly on Wednesday evening.”
The frightened boy who had memorized two English sentences before stepping onto that ship spent 75 years building a life that was anything but silent. “Because I learned to hear what people are thinking,” he said, “I think it stood me in good stead.”
