Mike Nichols arrived in America at seven as a refugee and ended up with an EGOT
In April 1939, as the Nazis rounded up Berlin's Jews, a seven-year-old named Igor Mikhail Peschkowsky and his three-year-old brother were sent alone to New York to join their father. The boy became Mike Nichols, half of a legendary comedy duo, director of The Graduate, and one of the rare people to win an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony.
His father, a physician from a Russian-Jewish family, renamed himself Paul Nichols after his patronymic and worked X-raying union members before his medical licence came through. Mike's mother escaped through Italy in 1940. From about age four Nichols had no hair, the result of an allergic reaction to a whooping cough vaccine, and he wore wigs and false eyebrows throughout adult life. He said he had no friends in America until he reached the University of Chicago, where he enrolled in pre-med in 1950 and also started a folk music show on radio station WFMT that still runs in its Saturday slot.
He first noticed Elaine May in the front row of a Chicago Miss Julie he was starring in. Weeks later, meeting by chance at a train station, he struck up a conversation posing as a spy with a fake accent, and she answered in an accent of her own. Both joined the Compass Players, forerunner of Second City, and from 1958 worked as Nichols and May. Their Broadway show album won the 1962 Grammy for best comedy album before tensions split them in 1961; they later reunited, and May wrote his films The Birdcage and Primary Colors.
Directing Neil Simon's Barefoot in the Park in 1963, which ran for 1,530 performances, he felt instantly that he had found his calling. The Odd Couple followed. With no film experience, he was hired for $400,000 to direct Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? after befriending Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton; it was the first film whose entire credited cast earned acting nominations.
For The Graduate he was paid $150,000 under a deal struck four years earlier, plus a share of the profits that made him a millionaire, and he won the Oscar for best director. His films collected 42 Academy Award nominations in all. He died in 2014.
Source: Mike Nichols
