One of The Hollywood Reporter s 100 Greatest Film Books of All Time A National Book Critics
Circle finalist One of People's top 10 books of 2021 An instant New York Times bestseller Named
a best book of the year by NPR and TimeA magnificent biography of one of the most protean
creative forces in American entertainment history a life of dazzling highs and vertiginous
plunges some of the worst largely unknown until now by the acclaimed author of Pictures at a
Revolution and Five Came Back Mike Nichols burst onto the scene as a wunderkind: while still in
his twenties he was half of a hit improv duo with Elaine May that was the talk of the country.
Next he directed four consecutive hit plays won back-to-back Tonys ushered in a new era of
Hollywood moviemaking with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and followed it with The Graduate
which won him an Oscar and became the third-highest-grossing movie ever. At thirty-five he
lived in a three-story Central Park West penthouse drove a Rolls-Royce collected Arabian
horses and counted Jacqueline Kennedy Elizabeth Taylor Leonard Bernstein and Richard Avedon
as friends. Where he arrived is even more astonishing given where he had begun: born Igor
Peschkowsky to a Jewish couple in Berlin in 1931 he was sent along with his younger brother to
America on a ship in 1939. The young immigrant boy caught very few breaks. He was bullied and
ostracized--an allergic reaction had rendered him permanently hairless--and his father died
when he was just twelve leaving his mother alone and overwhelmed. The gulf between these two
sets of facts explains a great deal about Nichols's transformation from lonely outsider to the
center of more than one cultural universe--the acute powers of observation that first made him
famous the nourishment he drew from his creative partnerships most enduringly with May his
unquenchable drive his hunger for security and status and the depressions and
self-medications that brought him to terrible lows. It would take decades for him to come to
grips with his demons. In an incomparable portrait that follows Nichols from Berlin to New York
to Chicago to Hollywood Mark Harris explores with brilliantly vivid detail and insight the
life work struggle and passion of an artist and man in constant motion. Among the 250 people
Harris interviewed: Elaine May Meryl Streep Stephen Sondheim Robert Redford Glenn Close
Tom Hanks Candice Bergen Emma Thompson Annette Bening Natalie Portman Julia Roberts Lorne
Michaels and Gloria Steinem. Mark Harris gives an intimate and evenhanded accounting of
success and failure alike the portrait is not always flattering but its ultimate impact is to
present the full story of one of the most richly interesting complicated and consequential
figures the worlds of theater and motion pictures have ever seen. It is a triumph of the
biographer's art.
