Director Mike Nichols Receives Guild's Highest Tribute at 56th Annual DGA Celebration

56th DGA Awards Lifetime Achievement Award Mike Nichols

January 05, 2004

DGA President Michael Apted announced today that director Mike Nichols has been selected to receive the Directors Guild of America Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of Nichols' distinguished career in motion picture directing. As the Guild's highest tribute, the Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to Nichols, one of the industry's finest practitioners, at the 56th Annual DGA Awards on February 7, 2004.

"There is hardly an entertainment medium that Mike Nichols hasn't pioneered and mastered," Apted said in announcing the award. "You can put any of these in front of his name with the word winner: Oscar®, Emmy, Tony, Grammy. But it's the absolute brilliance that he brought to feature film directing from day one — with his debut of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? followed a year later by his DGA and Oscar® Award winning direction of The Graduate — that propels us to honor his legacy to motion pictures. In his 37 years of directing films, Mike Nichols has brought millions of movie-goers into the theater. He has done it with class, intelligence, and always good humor."

The DGA Lifetime Achievement Award winner is selected by the present and past presidents of the Guild, although the award is not presented on an annual basis. In the Guild's 68-year history, only 30 directors have been recognized with the honor. Nichols now joins this illustrious list, which includes Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra and John Ford. [A complete list of winners appears below.]

In addition to the DGA Lifetime Achievement Award, Nichols received the Filmmaker Award at the 2000 DGA Honors as well as the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement for his 1967 film The Graduate, which also won him an Academy Award for Best Director. He was nominated for both DGA and Academy Awards a year earlier for his film directorial debut of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and for his direction of Working Girl in 1988; he also received a Best Director Oscar® nomination for Silkwood in 1983. Nichols has won seven Tony Awards, two Emmy Awards and, in 1961, shared a Grammy Award for Best Comedic Performance with his longtime artistic partner, Elaine May. He is one of only a handful of people to win all four of the major entertainment awards.

With a film directing career that has spanned nearly four decades, Nichols' other acclaimed features include such notables as Catch-22 (1970), Carnal Knowledge (1971), Heartburn (1986), Biloxi Blues (1988), Postcards From the Edge (1990), Regarding Henry (1991), Wolf (1994), The Birdcage (1996), and Primary Colors (1998). Nichols' 2001 film Wit (HBO), won Emmys for Outstanding Directing for a Miniseries, Movie or a Special and Outstanding Made for Television Movie. His most recent project is the critically acclaimed movie for television, Angels in America (HBO), where he directed a stellar cast that included Al Pacino, Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson and Mary-Louise Parker.

Nichols was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin, Germany of a Russian father and German mother. His family immigrated to the United States when he was seven. Raised in New York City, Nichols attended the University of Chicago where, together with Elaine May and Paul Sills, he was one of the founding members of the comedy group The Compass, later renamed Second City. Nichols is a recipient of the 2003 Kennedy Center Honors and is Chairman of the Board of Friends In Deed, a non-profit organization founded to provide support to those affected by life-threatening illness.

The DGA Lifetime Achievement Award was first presented in 1953, and has been bestowed thirty times:

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