Mike Nichols

Born Michael Peschkowsky in Berlin, Nichols and his family emigrated to the U.S. in 1938, to escape the Nazis. Though his father's death several years later left his family poor, Nichols worked his way through college at the University of Chicago, where he decided to become an actor. After studying with Lee Strasberg in New York, Nichols headed back to Chicago, where he formed an improv group with several actors, including May and Alan Arkin. Their comic and critical sensibilities well matched, Nichols and May performed as a pair in the latter half of the 1950s, earning raves for their sharp, satirical routines. After their 1960 hit Broadway show, +An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, closed in 1961, however, they parted ways. Nichols married his fourth wife, TV news star Diane Sawyer, in 1988. Mr. Nichols married Ms. Sawyer, his fourth wife, in April 1988. His first three marriages ended in divorce. He and his first wife, Patricia Scott, a singer who sometimes opened for Nichols and May, had no children. In addition to Ms. Sawyer, he is survived by a daughter, Daisy, from his second marriage, to Margo Callas, who had been a muse to the poet Robert Graves, lover of the writer Alastair Reid and was sometimes described as an Elaine May look-alike; another daughter, Jenny, and a son, Max, from his third marriage to Annabel Davis-Goff, a novelist.