Broadway's Marquee Lights Will Dim for Mike Nichols
(© David Gordon)
The Broadway community will pay tribute to multi-award-winning director Mike Nichols with a dimming of the marquee lights on Friday, November 21 at 7:45pm for 1 minute. Nichols died November 19 at the age of 83.
Nichols' five-decade career on Broadway began in 1960 with An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May, which ran for over 300 performances at the John Golden Theatre. For his stage work, Nichols was given Best Director Tony Awards for Neil Simon's plays Barefoot in the Park (1964), The Odd Couple (1965), Plaza Suite (1968), and The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1972); Murray Schisgal's Luv (1965); Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing (1984); Eric Idle and John Du Prez's musical Monty Python's Spamalot (2005); and Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (2012). As a producer, he also collected the Best Musical Tony for the original production of Annie, and the Best Play Tony for The Real Thing.
His other notable theatrical directing credits included the original productions of The Apple Tree, Streamers, and Hurlyburly, among many others. His final Broadway show was his 2013 revival of Harold Pinter's Betrayal, starring Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz. Nichols received Emmy Awards for his HBO film adaptations of Margaret Edson's Wit and Tony Kushner's Angels in America. At the time of his death, he was working on an HBO adaptation of Terrence McNally's Master Class, which was to reunite him with his Angels in America star Meryl Streep. In 2001, Nichols also directed a now-legendary production of The Seagull for the Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park that starred Streep, Kevin Kline, Christopher Walken, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Marcia Gay Harden, and Natalie Portman.
Married for 26 years to news anchor Diane Sawyer, Nichols is also survived by his children, Daisy, Max, and Jenny, and four grandchildren.
