It's difficult, of course, to write a book that seeks to know someone who seemed incapable of being known, but Harris does so perfectly; Mike Nichols is a masterful biography, and essential reading for anyone interested in theater or film ... Nichols, with his quicksilver mood and wide-ranging career, is a challenging subject for a biographer, but Harris does a beautiful job painting a portrait of a man who was as brilliant as he was enigmatic ... Harris also packs the book with his own intelligent analyses of Nichols' work ... Anyone with an abiding love for film or theater will be fascinated by Mike Nichols, but even those with only a passing familiarity with his work are likely to find themselves taken in by this engrossing biography. Harris' book is a masterwork, endlessly engaging, and one of the best biographies of an American artist to be published in recent years.
Mark Harris’s portrait of director Mike Nichols is a pleasure to read and a model biography: appreciative yet critical, unfailingly intelligent and elegantly written. Granted, Harris has a hyper-articulate, self-analytical subject who left a trail of press coverage behind him, but Nichols used his dazzling conversational gifts to obfuscate and beguile as much as to confide ... Harris, a savvy journalist and the author of two excellent cultural histories, makes judicious use of abundant sources in Mike Nichols: A Life to craft a shrewd, in-depth reckoning of the elusive man behind the polished facade ... Harris gently covers those declining years with respect for the achievements that preceded them. His marvelous book makes palpable in artful detail the extraordinary scope and brilliance of those achievements.
One way to read Mark Harris’s crisp new biography, Mike Nichols: A Life, is as a tender comedy about a man and his wigs ... Nichols was a hard man to get to know, and I’m not sure we understand him much better at the end of Mike Nichols: A Life. He was a man in perpetual motion, and Harris chases him with patience, clarity and care.
Harris is an ideal biographer...He’s expert at the inner workings of both theater and film, and his accounts of all of the major works offer a perfect balance of technical matters and insider tidbits, gleaned from an impressive roster of interviews ... Harris is clearly a fan, but not blind to his flaws ... Harris is skillful at evaluating and interpreting the critical consensus on the director’s midcareer oeuvre m... The book is long, but I would happily have had more of it. In many ways it’s a party with a fabulous guest list.
Metatheatre—is that the person or the actor?—is an underlying theme of Mark Harris’s hugely entertaining Mike Nichols: A Life [...] Who was Mike Nichols when he wasn’t playing Mike Nichols? It’s not an easy question ... Harris’s biography is filled with stories, and Nichols, who died in 2014, was, above all, a storyteller ... They’ve been polished smooth by circulation, and so have to be taken with a little salt, but they give genuine insights into how the Broadway and the Hollywood sausages are made. It helps that Harris himself is a talented storyteller.
... gleaming, teeming ... Without indulging in judginess, Mike Nichols: A Life shows how Nichols’s project choices and social jockeying became winged together, presenting a portrait of the artist as a sybaritic grandee.
... we get glimpses of the possibilities of a life in art, and its limits ... The story of the making of The Graduate has been told many times ... Here his most fascinating additions are the granular details of how Nichols’s decisions transformed a meh screenplay into the zeitgeist movie ... Harris is less willing to confront criticisms of the finished film, minimizing the objections of critics like Pauline Kael, who pointed out its slick banality ... sections of the book flag: Harris tells the reader that Nichols struggled with self-loathing but does not manage to show either his decline and his failures or his successes. Little time is spent on either his addiction to crack cocaine or his happy fourth marriage to Diane Sawyer ... Harris never does for Nichols what Nichols claims he had to do to succeed on a project—find a central metaphor. Maybe it’s unfair to say I would have liked a more reflective Nichols than Harris gives us, one who, even late in life, challenged the constraints and fads of the American theater and the limitations of his own character.
... wonderful ... In Harris’ hands, both the highs and the lows make for fascinating reading ... Harris is in top form here. His command of the theater world and the film industry and his smart and engaging writing make the book a pleasure to read ... It is Harris’ 250 interviews, however, that make the biography definitive.
You’ll spend much of Harris’s judicious and superbly well-written book trying to puzzle out the relationship of Nichols’ talent to his good fortune ... Mike Nichols: A Life is more the story of a career than a life, of a man who so feared downtime he cluttered it with showplace apartments, country squire estates, Arabian horses and, predictably, trophy spouses. And the critical bead on him got drawn early: He 'imparts muscle to what he touches, but not soul,' said one of his first critics, and as many have noted since, his movies are defined by precision and urbanity but also a certain chilly self-regard ... His peculiar gift was for making them feel safe being precarious. The essence of life is that it unfolds chronologically and according to no script. Actors must capture this essence, then somehow transfer it into highly artificial situations. If Nichols played taskmaster, it was only to remind them that what is happening here has never happened before; you have no idea what others will say or do next, you must stay spontaneous and reactive — all while subordinating yourself to a larger story. That was, finally, the great, impossible neither/nor of his genius, as it is, too, of Mark Harris’ wonderful book.
... exhaustive, emphatically chronological ... A must-read for Nichols fans, the book seamlessly incorporates hours of interviews with material from 60 years’ worth of Q&As, plus anecdotes and observations from 250 (I counted) uniformly admiring collaborators, associates and friends. This is an unapologetic celebration of the man rather than a critical exegesis of his work ... The wealth of new information Harris uncovers about Nichols’s formative years helps to explain the tightrope between overconfidence and insecurity that Nichols perpetually walked ... Harris doesn’t shy away from exposing Nichols’s neuroses, insecurities, performance anxieties and psychological crises, not to mention his mean streak—and nor does Nichols.
Mike Nichols: A Life refreshingly lacks the defensiveness and superiority that can define cinephilia, which tends to regard notable film direction as an act of conjuring performed by a single person ... Much of this seductive biography is devoted to the act of corralling various egos in the service of a project and the tap-dancing such endeavors entail ... Harris understands that film and theater direction is most broadly and immediately management, and so Mike Nichols: A Life often plays as an intense and glamorous workplace comedy ... Harris captures how personalities inform the artistic process, particularly how Nichols’s devotion to reinventing himself from outsider to insider was rechanneled into an ability to hone scripts at a biological level ... Harris’s crisp, funny, empathetic prose essentially glides one through Nichols’s life and career. In fact, this polish is redolent of a Nichols film, which means that you may wonder what else might have been revealed had more space been made for gritty details ... As in many a Nichols film, though, there’s more anguish here than might initially meet the eye. The book has a haunting, beautifully intangible quality. We’re occasionally allowed to feel as if we’re catching true glimmers of Igor, the wounded, lonely Jewish boy who forged himself into a hybrid of Cinderella and Gatsby.
Harris is a savvy enough reporter and critic to tell when stories like the young Nichols’ limited, transatlantic vocabulary probably became truth through retelling; he’s also keen enough in his role of biographer to recognize when a subject simply wouldn’t cooperate with the conventions of the biographical form ... Harris has sidestepped that pitfall of even the most engrossing bio: the endlessly deadening chapters that’d be better left to the 'Early life' section of a Wikipedia page. It’s a good indication that, despite occasionally needling quirks like the telegraphing of fateful meetings with future collaborators, Mike Nichols is a cinderblock of a book whose weight is never felt in the reading ... Getting May on the record stands as one of the book’s major accomplishments, one that calls out for a full-fledged follow-up ... The picture of Nichols that comes through most sharply across nearly 700 pages is of someone who lived to create and help others create.
Harris, a proven scholar of Hollywood, writes brilliantly and gathers momentum with deeply researched, fascinating forensic passages about the challenges and conflicts of Nichols’ great projects. The result, though, is more a career study and, often, a technical gloss than a truly palpable 'life,' despite the dutiful chronicling of Nichols’ low- and high-profile marriages, his children, his buying and selling of Arabian horses, his self-doubt and depression. Harris’s 600-page opus is often too digressive, if entertainingly so ... But as B’way and Hollywood bios go, this is one boffo book.
Mark Harris’s 600-plus page biography of comic-turned-director Mike Nichols will be an essential starting point for future work on this legendary show business luminary ... This is definitely a 'warts and all' biography, chronicling in detail Nichols four marriages, his drug abuse, and his mental breakdowns. The dark sections are balanced by accounts of Nichols’ gift of friendship. More important, the book offers a detailed study of the ups and downs of a career that spanned over half a century ... Mark Harris’s biography is a must for every film and theatre buff. Every moment in Nichols’ life and career comes vividly alive. The book is also a meticulous piece of scholarship, thoroughly annotated and containing a generous selection of illustrations. Mike Nichols: A Life is an invaluable contribution to the history of American theatre and film since World War II as well as a colorful portrait of one of its most celebrated and at times denigrated practitioners.
... fascinating, exhaustively researched, and utterly absorbing ... Harris...clearly has an empathy and a deep admiration for Nichols, but this is not a sugarcoated biography. The piercing cruelty Nichols could show toward performers, often pushing them to the edge of breakdown during rehearsals, is dealt with frankly ... The burden of Mike Nichols: A Life is that it has to retain its readers’ attention to such a degree that they can resist the urge to put the book down for a few hours and watch a Nichols film.
A Mike Nichols credit always made the heart race with anticipation. So does Mike Nichols: A Life, an epic biography of an epic creative life. In page after page, writer Mark Harris delivers an engrossing narrative while exploring the qualities that made Nichols a thoughtful and generous friend and an encouraging, insightful director, his brilliance tempered by insecurities and destructive self-indulgence ... Harris details how the Nichols touch, at full strength, brought out the creative best in any collaboration.
... deeply researched and readable if less than fully satisfying ... His was quite the origin story, and Harris tells it well ... Harris writes with great compassion about his subject’s struggles with depression and the survivor’s guilt that came with getting out of Germany just in the nick of time. He is also admirably clear-eyed and canny about Nichols’s foibles and directorial missteps ... Unfortunately, there’s no particular through line, and Harris’s methodical storytelling—the book unfolds chronologically rather than thematically—tends to flatten the narrative. It becomes a fusillade of anecdotes ... At the end, Nichols remains something of an enigma to the reader. Then again, Nichols was a mystery to himself as well.
... refreshingly lacks the defensiveness and superiority that can define cinephilia, which tends to regard notable film direction as an act of conjuring performed by a single person ... Harris understands the machinations of show business on a granular level. Much of this seductive biography is devoted to the act of corralling various egos in the service of a project and the tap-dancing such endeavors entail ... Harris understands that film and theater direction is most broadly and immediately management, and so Mike Nichols: A Life often plays as an intense and glamorous workplace comedy ... Harris captures how personalities inform the artistic process, particularly how Nichols’s devotion to reinventing himself from outsider to insider was rechanneled into an ability to hone scripts at a biological level ... reads much faster than its 600-page length would suggest, as Harris’s crisp, funny, empathetic prose essentially glides one through Nichols’s life and career. In fact, this polish is redolent of a Nichols film, which means that you may wonder what else might have been revealed had more space been made for gritty details ... The book has a haunting, beautifully intangible quality. We’re occasionally allowed to feel as if we’re catching true glimmers of Igor, the wounded, lonely Jewish boy who forged himself into a hybrid of Cinderella and Gatsby ... Harris understands Nichols as a wizard of process, spinning neuroses into art that, at its best, danced on the fault lines between the personal and the commercial.
In the sprawling yet intimate Mike Nichols: A Life, Mark Harris captures the ups and downs, the enthralling highs and ragged despair ... Harris artfully tracks Nichols' deep desire to work and to inspire others to embrace the power of theater and film ... Candid, colorful and chock-full of detail, Mike Nichols: A Life is the biography that Nichols well deserves.
Few directors had a better sense of what actions would suit specific actors than Nichols did, and Mark Harris’s new book Mike Nichols: A Life amply chronicles how his development of these principles revolutionized American entertainment, making the highbrow more accessible and the lowbrow more respectable ... vastly entertaining ... though subtitled A Life, is less a biography than a project-by-project chronicle of Nichols’ roller-coaster career ... Not even his long marriage to Diane Sawyer nudges his career into the background. In part, this is because Harris finds the self-dramatizing Nichols hopelessly opaque, but mostly it’s just that the stories behind films like Carnal Knowledge and Primary Colors, and of the New York glitterati at their most glittery, are far more interesting.
... excellent ... Nichols’s career has been well-documented and extensively celebrated, and it is with some wariness that one approaches the new Harris biography. A project undertaken with the family’s blessing, sporting a book jacket crowded with celebrity blurbs, buoyed by countless A-List interviews, and written by a well-connected insider friendly with his subject invites suspicion...Fortunately, such concerns are swiftly dissipated, although the book is not without its flaws. The last third of the narrative does indeed nearly devolve into a series of gentle and self-serving first-person anecdotes, and the study refrains from penetrating analyses of Nichols’s oeuvre. Moreover, Harris often slips into the passive voice when criticizing his subject ... Nevertheless, these are modest quibbles. Mike Nichols: A Life is extraordinarily well researched; unflinching in assessing its subject’s foibles, follies, and failings; and comprehensive. It will take its place as the standard single volume study of its subject. And the biography is not just well done, it is an absolute page-turner.
... where Harris’s book really sings is in revealing a different sort of major Hollywood figure than the ones we’re used to seeing lionized. Too often, books about great directors focus on what made them irascible assholes, constantly stomping on anyone who got in their way in the name of making 'great art'. This narrative of how good movies are made is so deeply ingrained in our culture that it’s been incredibly hard to displace, even in an era when we’re more predisposed to examine the toxicity inherent to this method of moviemaking...But Mike Nichols: A Life is interested, first and foremost, in Nichols as a collaborator ... Some of the best parts of Harris’s book delve into Nichols’s struggles with drug addiction, depression, and money troubles. In particular, Harris’s depiction of Nichols’s spirals throughout the 1970s and ’80s offer an empathetic view of how mental health problems can cause serious struggle even for the rich and famous. And Harris’s depiction of Nichols’s childhood, in which he narrowly escaped Nazi Germany, undergirds everything that follows ... For a nearly 600-page book (before endnotes), Mike Nichols: A Life is a bright and breezy read, full of interesting anecdotes and great observations about Nichols’s creative process and his many, many collaborations with equally talented people. Above all, it captures an iconoclast who was, nevertheless, really good at working within the showbiz system.
... a closely detailed, comprehensive portrait by a biographer riveted, as many of us are, by his charismatic subject ... I was ready to read much more about those early years, especially how Nichols first became interested in horses at a local stable. But Harris chose to take his cue from his subject, who said many times and in many ways, 'Yes, I had a tough childhood — but enough already…Let’s start now' ... Though I occasionally wondered why I was reading details about such forgotten films as The Day of the Dolphin, The Fortune, and Wolf — instead of an analysis of Nichols’s indifference to the politics of the time — I was pleased to be in the hands of a biographer clear about his intentions, who would not get lost in the weeds ... If overwhelming to the reader, how much more overwhelming this material and network of relationships was for the biographer, who not only had to organize this enormous and formidable cast of characters but had to socialize with many of them in New York after the book was published. Although I wish Harris had probed more deeply into the workings of those relationships, there is more than enough content in this biography to chew on. I did not skim a single page of Mike Nichols: A Life.
... robust ... Harris’ skill as a storyteller is on full view ... This ground has been covered before, but Harris brings new dimension and context to the story, showing in vivid detail and with a novelist’s feel for narrative, that Nichols’ directorial career, despite its phenomenal beginning, had its share of low points. Nichols’ reactions to such film flops as Catch-22 and The Day of the Dolphin are covered much more fully here than in the necessarily celebratory oral history, and they provide some of the book’s most revealing glimpses of Nichols’ personal vulnerability. Like the best biographies, Harris brings his subject’s life and work together in a perfectly unified whole.
... endlessly interesting ... Harris plainly loves the industry that he writes about, so there’s lots of analysis and inside scoop about how movies were made ... Nichols’s life was long and amazing. Mark Harris makes 594 pages a total blast. You want to know his subject, while also learning from him. His story of the brilliant Mike Nichols reminds us how much we must risk failure in order to succeed. What a great, enriching read. Go get it.
A full-dress biography of a quintessential artist who mastered stage, screen, and (especially) comedy ... In this thorough and compassionate life, Harris doesn’t search too hard for a common thread; more than anything, it seems, Nichols was hungry for an audience’s attention and had an innate enough grasp of staging and actors to (usually) get it ... by structuring the biography around his projects, Harris underdevelops his subject’s inner character; we learn nearly as much about his prized Arabian horses as his children. It may simply be that Nichols’ life was his work, but focusing on his creative triumphs at times obscures the man who made them. A sturdy, sympathetic biography about one of pop culture’s rangiest creators.
What subtly emerges between the lines of Harris’s magnificent biography, though, is a more collaborative view of filmmaking—a refreshing alternative to the auteurist approach that figures the history of American cinema as simply a linear continuum of Important Films made by Great Men ... Spanning the better part of the 20th century and flitting through plenty of illustrious social circles, Harris’s book is a trove of usable wisdom about the creative process.
Harris (Five Came Back) delivers an entertaining portrait of actor, director, and producer Mike Nichols in this bracingly candid biography ... Harris empathetically digs into his subject’s private life ... Harris also doesn’t gloss over Nichols’s demons, including his drug use, demand for perfection, and 'irritability and condescension' on set. The result is a joyously readable and balanced account of a complex man.
