“If you want to be as invisible as is practical, then it’s fun to do a lot of different things.”


By CHARLES McGRATH


Except for a puzzling string of duds in the mid-’70s, almost all of Mike Nichols’s movies have made money, and a few, like“The Graduate, have been recognized as cultural landmarks. But it’s sometimes hard to say what makes a Nichols movie a Nichols movie. They seem like vehicles for actors, not the director, whose stamp is in leaving almost no trace of himself.

“If you want to be a legend, God help you, it’s so easy,”Mr. Nichols said recently.“You just do one thing. You can be the master of suspense, say. But if you want to be as invisible as is practical, then it’s fun to do a lot of different things.”

If his movies have a common denominator, it’s probably their intelligence and, though Mr. Nichols doesn’t think of himself as a writer, they have a writerly attention to detail.

Rajendra Roy, the organizer of a recent retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, said:“ He’s an example of how popular cinema can be vision based.

Nora Ephron, who wrote the script for Mr. Nichols’s movie “Heartburn and co-wrote his film “Silkwood, said recently:“It’s supposed to be a given that Mike doesn’t have the visual style of, say, a Scorsese. But that isn’t fair. Mike doesn’t use the camera in a flamboyant way, but he has a style just the way a writer who’s crystal clear has a style. He has an almost invisible fluidity.”

Mr. Nichols is now 77 but hardly slowing down. His most recent film was“Charlie Wilson’s War,”and he is considering movies based on scripts by David Mamet and Tony Kushner.

Still boyish looking, Mr. Nichols retains the quicksilver wit that for a while made him and Elaine May the most innovative comedians in the United States.

He was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky, the son of a White Russian doctor who emigrated to Berlin after the Russian revolution, and he arrived in New York in 1939, at the age of 7, permanently hairless (a reaction to whooping cough vaccine) and with almost no English. He enrolled at the Dalton School, an elite private school, and set about cultivating what he calls his“immigrant’s ear.”

“Semiconsciously I was thinking all the time:‘How do they do it? Let me listen,’ he recalled. His father died when he was 12, plunging the family into genteel poverty.

He attended the University of Chicago, floundered a bit, and then was heaped with success, first with Ms. May and next as a theater director. Mr. Nichols is one of very few in the performing arts to receive all four major American entertainment awards: he has a Grammy, an Oscar, four Emmys and eight Tonys. Along the way there were countless girlfriends, multiple wives, paintings, cars, a stable.

The only thing he doesn’t have enough of anymore is time. He used to love to develop a play out of town, then put it aside for a few months.“Everything gets simpler on the shelf,”he said. He also recalled, with amazement, how long he was allowed to work on“The Graduate,”which he directed when he was in his mid-30s.

“It’s painful and hard to remember now how long and how carefully we worked,”he recalled.

But he never lost his joy for connecting with an audience:“The greatest thrill is that moment when a thousand people are sitting in the dark, looking at the same scene, and they are all apprehending something that has not been spoken. That’s the thrill of it, the miracle - that’s what holds us to movies forever.