Academy Award Winning Director Mike Nichols to Receive Guild's Highest Tribute at 56th Annual DGA Celebration

Business Wire, Jan 5, 2004

Entertainment Editors

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 5, 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(R), 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(R) 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(R) 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), "Primary Colors" (1998) and "Wit" (2001, HBO). His most recent project was 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.

On Tuesday, January 6, 2004, the DGA will release the names of its five nominees for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film in a 10 a.m. press conference at the Guild's Los Angeles headquarters at 7920 W. Sunset Blvd.

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

1953 Cecil B. De Mille
1954 John Ford
1956 Henry King
1957 King Vidor
1959 Frank Capra
1960 George Stevens
1961 Frank Borzage
1966 William Wyler
1968 Alfred Hitchcock
1970 Fred Zinnemann
1973 David Lean
1973 William A. Wellman
1981 George Cukor
1982 Rouben Mamoulian
1983 John Huston
1984 Orson Welles
1985 Billy Wilder
1986 Joseph L. Mankiewicz
1987 Elia Kazan
1988 Robert E. Wise
1990 Ingmar Bergman
1992 Akira Kurosawa
1993 Sidney Lumet
1994 Robert Altman
1995 James Ivory
1996 Woody Allen
1997 Stanley Kubrick
1998 Francis Ford Coppola
2000 Steven Spielberg
2003 Martin Scorsese