Middle years: Silkwood, Working Girl, and The Birdcage

Five years elapsed before Nichols’s next film, Gilda Live (1980), made it to the screen. A recording of comedian Gilda Radner’s Broadway show, it served up several of her popular skits and characters from NBC’s TV show Saturday Night Live. It was Silkwood (1983), however, that marked Nichols’s return to form. Meryl Streep starred as Karen Silkwood, a real-life lab worker at a nuclear plant in Oklahoma who died (1974) under mysterious circumstances while trying to expose safety violations at the facility. Streep, Cher (in a supporting role), film editor Sam O’Steen, Nichols, and the screenplay (by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen) received Academy Award nominations.

In 1984 Nichols netted a fifth Tony for directing the play The Real Thing. He then returned to the big screen with Heartburn (1986), an adaptation of Ephron’s semiautobiographical novel about a pregnant woman who learns that her husband is cheating on her. Streep and Nicholson stood in for Ephron and journalist Carl Bernstein, Ephron’s then husband. Biloxi Blues (1988) was Nichols’s first filming of a play by his longtime stage collaborator Simon, who adapted his popular comedy into a more naturalistic period piece about a young man (Matthew Broderick) who comes of age while undergoing army basic training in the 1940s. As his cruel drill sergeant, Christopher Walken was especially notable.

Nichols next made the romantic drama Working Girl (1988), his biggest hit since The Graduate. Melanie Griffith played a rough-edged Staten Island woman who takes a job as a secretary at a New York brokerage house and survives the exploitative maneuvers of her icy boss (Sigourney Weaver) to win her dream job, landing a handsome arbitrageur (Harrison Ford) in the process. The film’s six Academy Award nominations included best picture, and Nichols also received a nod for his direction. Postcards from the Edge (1990), adapted by Carrie Fisher from her acerbic semiautobiographical novel, starred Streep as an addicted actress who has to endure first drug rehabilitation and then probation with her alcoholic, domineering mother (Shirley MacLaine) before finally getting her life under control. Nichols’s satiric portrait of Hollywood was keenly observed, and both Streep and MacLaine earned praise for their performances.

Nichols then directed Regarding Henry (1991), which was widely derided by critics. The sentimental drama starred Ford as a ruthless and narcissistic lawyer whose life becomes a clean slate when a gunshot wound leaves him amnesiac, childlike, and nearly helpless. Aided by the love of his family (Annette Bening and Mikki Allen), he regains his physical and intellectual competency and begins to question his previous behavior. Many found his transformation unrealistic—unavoidable, perhaps, given J.J. Abrams’s jejune screenplay—and the film had a lukewarm reception at the box office. Nichols did not fare much better with his much-hyped Wolf (1994), from the novel by Jim Harrison about a rather meek book editor who, once bitten, is fated to turn into a werewolf. Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer made an appealing romantic combo, and the early scenes keenly satirized New York’s publishing world. However, Wolf suffered when it shifted to a horror film.

Much better was The Birdcage (1996), a remake of the French hit La Cage aux folles (1978). It starred Robin Williams as Armand Goldman, the owner of a drag club, and Nathan Lane as Albert Goldman, a performer and Armand’s partner. Things become complicated when Armand’s son gets engaged and his fiancée’s conservative parents (Gene Hackman and Dianne Wiest) arrive for a visit. The cast made the most of their May-scripted lines. May also wrote the Oscar-nominated script for Nichols’s Primary Colors (1998), an adaptation of the best-selling political novel by an anonymous writer (later revealed to be journalist Joe Klein). John Travolta was wholly convincing as the charismatic Bill Clintonesque presidential candidate who is always a step away from a sex scandal. Also notable were Emma Thompson as his wife and Kathy Bates as a canny adviser.

What Planet Are You From? (2000) was a critical and commercial disappointment. The uneven sci-fi comedy starred Garry Shandling (who coscripted) as an alien who travels to Earth tasked with finding a woman he can impregnate; others in the cast included Bening, Greg Kinnear, Ben Kingsley, and John Goodman.

Later projects: Wit, Angels in America, Spamalot, and Death of a Salesman

Wit (2001), made for HBO, was a likelier project for Nichols. An adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Margaret Edson, it starred Thompson (who coscripted with Nichols) as a cancer-stricken English professor who reflects on key moments of her life as she undergoes chemotherapy in a hopeless battle to beat the disease. Nichols won an Emmy Award for his direction, as he did for the 2003 HBO production of Tony Kushner’s play about the ravages of the AIDS epidemic, Angels in America. The miniseries was both highly popular and a huge critical success, winning 10 further Emmys. The all-star cast included Streep, Thompson, Al Pacino, Mary-Louise Parker, and Jeffrey Wright.

Nichols returned to the big screen with Closer (2004). It also had its roots on Broadway, but unlike Angels in America the scope of the erotic drama was intensely intimate, focusing on the relationships of four people (Natalie Portman, Clive Owen, Julia Roberts, and Jude Law). Nichols then directed the Broadway production Monty Python’s Spamalot, which earned him another Tony. His next film was Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), an entertaining political drama, scripted by Aaron Sorkin and based on the true story of Texas congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks), who assisted the mujahideen in their fight against the Soviet Union during the Afghan War in the 1980s. Philip Seymour Hoffman was well cast as a CIA agent, and Roberts was amusing as a wealthy Texas socialite who encourages Wilson’s efforts. Nichols subsequently returned to the stage, and in 2012 he won his seventh Tony Award (for best director) for his revival of Arthur Miller’s classic drama Death of a Salesman, featuring Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Nichols was the recipient of numerous awards, including a Kennedy Center Honor (2003) and the American Film Institute’s Life Achievement Award (2010). He was one of the few people to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony.