Mark Harris’ new lively biography, 
Mike Nichols: A Daily life

, contains an anecdote oft-told in interviews by Dustin Hoffman. Hoffman, then an unknown, resisted looking through for the element of Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate, a plum position that could, and later did, make him a star. But at the time he felt he would have been miscast. “This character is so WASPish,” he protested to Nichols, who directed the movie. Nichols responded, “Perhaps he’s Jewish within.”
Nichols’ Jewish identification and his immigrant perspective on American culture and human foibles educated his do the job. A mere recitation of his estimable stage and display screen credits would just take up the space of this article (It requires Harris upward of 600 webpages to do justice to this prodigious artist). But here’s some highlights:
Unique member of the Playwrights Theater Club, which developed into The 2nd Town a person-50 percent of the famous comedy team of Nichols and May perhaps 9-time Tony Award-winner for these kinds of solutions as the authentic 
The Odd Couple

the Philip Seymour Hoffman-starring revival of 
Death of a Salesman 

and the blockbuster musical 
Spamalot

the Oscar-successful director of 
The Graduate

and the Emmy-profitable director of 
Wit

and 
Angels in The us.
Nichols is in the exhibit organization EGOT pantheon of individuals who have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony.
Far more revelatory than the at the rear of-the-scenes tales of Nichols’ many successes are the kinds about his failures, these kinds of as his unwell-fated monitor adaptation of Joseph Heller’s 
Catch-22

. Although the film has grown in important esteem about the a long time, at the time, Nichols knew it was doomed when it was preceded in theaters by Robert Altman’s 
M*A*S*H

. “I nearly handed out,” Nichols claimed upon viewing the movie. “It was outstanding and alive and it set us to shame.”
With Nichols owning labored with this kind of promethean abilities as Neil Simon, Robin Williams, Nathan Lane, Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Whoopi Goldberg, and Steve Martin, A Life (Penguin Push) is entertaining just for its display organization anecdotes, these as the now mythic encounter involving University of Chicago pupils Nichols and Elaine Could on a general public transportation system. Nichols approached her and in a German accent asked, “May perhaps I zit down?” “You are Agent X-9?” she responded, and the two literally designed a scene through that fateful coach experience.
Nichols was born Igor Michael Peschkowsky in Berlin in 1931, but as Harris relates, Nichols thought of himself born at the age of 7 when in 1939, he fled Hitler’s Germany with his brother on a ship bound for The us. “A Jew in Nazi Germany, moms and dads generally battling,” he once dryly mused. “Usually are not all childhoods poor?”
Harris recounts unpleasant childhood tales in which his German accent and bald head (an allergic response to a whooping cough vaccine) created him experience like an outsider at his private university that acknowledged Jews. “I was a zero,” Nichols would recall. “In each and every way that mattered I was powerless.” He would be motivated for a very long time right after,” he mentioned, “by revenge,” which may, in portion, account for his often-devastating wit.
Another highly effective recurring topic is survivor’s guilt. Harris recounts that a single of the points that moved Nichols to do the job with then-unfamiliar effectiveness artist Whoopi Goldberg was a character piece she did about a junkie who visits Anne Frank’s museum. “Nichols wept,” Harris writes. “He went backstage, hugged her, and available his assist on the location.” Nichols directed the one-female exhibit that put her on the cultural map.
A Life is an understated title for one with such an extraordinary career. Nichols, who died in 2014, had his own suggestions for the title of his biography. In 2000, he was solid as Carmela Soprano’s psychiatrist on an episode of The Sopranos, but Nichols eventually backed out. “You have to have a further Jew-I am the improper Jew for this particular shrink,” he explained to the show’s creator, David Chase. “That should really be the title of my biography-‘The Mistaken Jew.'”
Donald Liebenson is a Chicago writer who writes for VanityFair.com , LA Times , Chicago Tribune , and other retailers.
