Director Mike Nichols has died at 83. He had a lot of hits during his long career - The Graduate, Silkwood, Biloxi Blues, Working Girl, Postcards From the Edge...and his share of failures, too. He began as a stage director, and was always very good with actors. He never really established a distinctive personality of his own in his films, instead just serving his material as intelligently as he could, which these days is a vanishing and underrated virtue. Need I say that my favorite film of his is his first, Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1966), which shows how he could guide and instill confidence in his performers, and also demonstrates what he had learned from his stage work, as in this scene, where he uses the camera to set up the audience and intensify the key moment in a way that a live performance of the play would never allow. Thanks, Mike.
Posted on: Fri, 21 Nov 2014 03:38:14 +0000
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