Elaine May

Elaine Iva May (née Berlin; born April 21, 1932) is an American comedian, filmmaker, playwright, and actress. She first gained fame in the 1950s for her improvisational comedy routines with Mike Nichols, before transitioning her career as a groundbreaking film director and screenwriter. She has received numerous awards, including a BAFTA Award, a Grammy Award, and a Tony Award. She was honored with the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2013, and the Honorary Academy Award in 2022.^{[1][2][3][4][5]}

Elaine May
May performing in 1959
Born	Elaine Iva Berlin (1932-04-21) April 21, 1932 (age 90) Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Other names	Esther Dale, Elly May
Occupations	Actress comedian playwright screenwriter film director
Years active	1955–present
Known for	A New Leaf (1971) The Heartbreak Kid (1972) Mikey and Nicky (1976) Ishtar (1987)
Spouses	Marvin Irving May ​ ​ (m. 1948; div. 1960)​ Sheldon Harnick ​ ​ (m. 1962; div. 1963)​ David L. Rubinfine ​ ​ (m. 1963; died 1982)​
Partner	Stanley Donen (1999–2019; his death)
Children	Jeannie Berlin
Awards	Full list
Signature

In 1955, May moved to Chicago and became a founding member of the Compass Players, an improvisational theater group. She began working alongside Nichols and in 1957, they both quit the group to form their own stage act, Nichols and May. In New York, they performed nightly in clubs in Greenwich Village alongside Joan Rivers and Woody Allen, as well as on the Broadway stage. They also made regular appearances on television and radio broadcasts. They released multiple comedy albums and received four Grammy Award nominations, winning Best Comedy Album for An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May in 1962. Their collaboration was covered in the PBS documentary Nichols and May: Take Two (1996).

After her partnership with Nichols ended, May infrequently acted in films, including Luv, Enter Laughing (both 1967), and California Suite (1978). She became the first female director with a Hollywood deal since Ida Lupino when she directed the 1971 black screwball comedy A New Leaf.^[6] Experimenting with genres, she regularly broke the mold in directing critically acclaimed films, including the dark romantic comedy The Heartbreak Kid (1972), the gangster film Mikey and Nicky (1976), and adventure comedy Ishtar (1987). May received her first Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay nominations for Heaven Can Wait (1978) and Primary Colors (1998).^[7] She reunited with Nichols for The Birdcage (1996).

She returned to the Broadway stage in Lila Neugebauer's revival of Kenneth Lonergan's play The Waverly Gallery (2018).^[8] May received rapturous reviews for her performance, and won the 2019 Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play,^[9][10] becoming the second-oldest performer behind Lois Smith to win a Tony Award for acting.^[11] In 2022, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences gave May an Honorary Academy Award for her "bold, uncompromising approach to filmmaking, as a writer, director, and actress".^{[12][3][4][5]}

Early years and personal life

Elaine Iva Berlin was born on April 21, 1932, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Jewish parents, theater director and actor Jack Berlin and actress Ida (Aaron) Berlin.^{[13]: 39 [14]} As a child, May performed with her father in his traveling Yiddish theater company, which he took around the country. Her stage debut on the road was at the age of three, and she eventually played the character of a generic little boy named Benny.^[15]

Because the troupe toured extensively, May had been in over 50 schools by the time she was ten, having spent as little as a few weeks enrolled at any one time. May said she hated school and would spend her free time at home reading fairy tales and mythology.^[16]: 331 Her father died when she was 11 years old, and then she and her mother moved to Los Angeles, where May later enrolled in Hollywood High School. She dropped out when she was fourteen years old. Two years later, at the age of sixteen, she married Marvin May, an engineer and toy inventor. They had one child, Jeannie Berlin (born 1949), who became an actress and screenwriter. The couple divorced in 1960, and she married lyricist Sheldon Harnick in 1962; they divorced a year later. In 1964, May married her psychoanalyst, David L. Rubinfine; they remained married until his death in 1982.^[16]: 332

May's longtime companion was director Stanley Donen, from 1999 until his death in 2019.^[17] Donen said he proposed marriage "about 172 times".^[18]

Stage career

After her marriage to Marvin May, she studied acting. She also held odd jobs during that period, such as a roof salesman, and tried to enroll in college. She learned, however, that colleges in California required a high school diploma to apply, which she did not have.^[13]: 39 After finding out that the University of Chicago was one of the few colleges that would accept students without diplomas, she set out with seven dollars and hitchhiked to Chicago.^[15]

Soon after moving to Chicago in 1950, May began informally taking classes at the university by auditing, sitting in without enrolling. She nevertheless sometimes engaged in discussions with instructors and once started a huge fight after saying that Socrates' apology was a political move. Mike Nichols, who was then an actor in the school's theatrical group, remembers her coming to his philosophy class, making "outrageous" comments, and leaving.^[16]: 324 They learned about each other from friends, eventually being introduced after one of his stage shows. The director, Paul Sills, brought May to Nichols and said, "Mike, I want you to meet the only other person on the campus of the University of Chicago who’s as hostile as you are: Elaine May." Six weeks later, they bumped into each other at a train station in Chicago and soon began spending time together over the following weeks as "dead-broke theatre junkies."^[16]: 324f

The Compass Players

In 1955, May joined a new, off-campus improvisational theater group in Chicago, The Compass Players, becoming one of its charter members. The group was founded by Sills and David Shepherd. Nichols later joined the group, wherein he resumed his friendship with May. At first he was unable to improvise well on stage, but with inspiration from May, they began developing improvised comedy sketches together.^[16]: 333 Nichols remembered this period:

From then on it became mostly pleasure because of Elaine's generosity. The fact of Elaine—her presence—kept me going. She was the only one who had faith in me. I loved it... We had a similar sense of humor and irony... When I was with her I became something more than I had been before.^[16]: 333

Actress Geraldine Page recalled they worked together with great efficiency, "like a juggernaut."^[16]: 336 Thanks in part to Nichols and May, the Compass Players became an enormously popular satirical comedy troupe. They helped the group devise new stage techniques to adapt the freedom they had during the workshop.^[19]: 16

 

May, Nichols and Dorothy Loudon, 1959

May became prominent as a member of the Compass's acting group, a quality others in the group observed. Bobbi Gordon, an actor, remembers that she was often the center of attention: "The first time I met her was at Compass... Elaine was this grande dame of letters. With people sitting around her feet, staring up at her, open-mouthed in awe, waiting for 'The Word'."^[16]: 330f A similar impression struck Compass actor Bob Smith:

May would hold court, discussing her days as a child actor in the Yiddish theater, as men hung on her every word. Every guy who knew her was in love with her. You'd have been stupid not to have been.^[16]: 329

As an integral member of their group, May was open to giving novices a chance, including the hiring of a black actor and generally making the group "more democratic". And by observing her high level of performance creativity, everyone's work was improved.^[16]: 330 "She was the strongest woman I ever met," adds Compass actor Nancy Ponder.^[16]: 330

In giving all her attention to acting, however, she neglected her home life. Fellow actress Barbara Harris recalled that May lived in a cellar with only one piece of furniture, a ping-pong table. "She wore basic beatnik black and, like her film characters, was a brilliant disheveled klutz."^[16]: 330

Because she was physically attractive, some members of the group, including Nichols, became distracted during workshops. Group actor Omar Shapli was "struck by her piercing, dark-eyed, sultry stare. It was really unnerving," he says.^[16]: 329 Nichols remembers that "everybody wanted Elaine, and the people who got her couldn't keep her." Theater critic John Lahr agrees, noting that "her juicy good looks were a particularly disconcerting contrast to her sharp tongue."^[16]: 329

"Elaine was too formidable, one of the most intelligent, beautiful, and witty women I had ever met. I hoped I would never see her again."

Richard Burton^[16]: 331

May's sense of humor, including what she found funny about everyday life, was different from others' in the group. Novelist Herbert Gold, who dated May, says that "she treated everything funny that men take seriously... She was never serious. Her life was a narrative."^[16]: 329 Another ex-boyfriend, James Sacks, says that "Elaine had a genuine beautiful madness." Nevertheless, states Gold, "she was very cute, a lot like Debra Winger, just a pretty Jewish girl."^[16]: 329

May was considered highly intelligent. "She's about fifty percent more brilliant than she needs to be," says actor Eugene Troobnick. Those outside their theater group sometimes noticed that same quality. British actor Richard Burton, who was married to Elizabeth Taylor at the time, agreed with that impression after he first met May while he was starring in Camelot on Broadway.^[16]: 331

Nichols and May comedy team

 

Nichols and May, 1960

Nichols was personally asked to leave the Compass Players in 1957 because he and May became too good, which threw the company off balance, noted club manager Jay Landsman. Nichols was told he had too much talent.^[16]: 338 Nichols then left the group in 1957, with May quitting with him. They next formed their own stand-up comedy team, Nichols and May. After contacting some agents in New York, they were asked to audition for Jack Rollins, who would later become Woody Allen's manager and executive producer. Rollins said he was stunned by how good their act was:

Their work was so startling, so new, as fresh as could be. I was stunned by how really good they were, actually as impressed by their acting technique as by their comedy... They were totally adventurous and totally innocent, in a certain sense. That's why it was accepted. They would uncover little dark niches that you felt but had never expressed... I'd never seen this technique before. I thought, My God, these are two people writing hilarious comedy on their feet!^[16]: 340

By 1960, they made their Broadway debut with An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, which later won a Grammy. After performing their act a number of years in New York's various clubs, and then on Broadway, with most of the shows sold out, Nichols could not believe their success:

We were winging it, making it up as we went along. It never even crossed our minds that it had any value beyond the moment. It was great to study and learn and work there. We were stunned when we got to New York... Never for a moment did we consider that we would do this for a living. It was just a handy way to make some money until we grew up.^[16]: 333

His feelings were shared by May, who was also taken aback by their success, especially having some real income after living in near-poverty. She told a Newsweek interviewer, "When we came to New York, we were practically barefoot. And I still can't get used to walking in high heels."^[16]: 343

The uniqueness of their act made them an immediate success in New York. Their style became the "next big thing" in live comedy. Charles H. Joffe, their producer, remembers that sometimes the line to their show went around the block. That partly explains why Milton Berle, a major television comedy star, tried three times without success to see their act.^[16]: 341 Critic Lawrence Christon recalls his first impression after seeing their act: "You just knew it was a defining moment. They caught the urban tempo, like Woody Allen did."^[16]: 343 They performed nightly at mostly sold-out shows, in addition to making TV program and commercial^[20][21] appearances and radio broadcasts.^[16]: 346 Their relatively brief time together as comedy stars led New York talk show host Dick Cavett to call their act "one of the comic meteors in the sky". Woody Allen said, "the two of them came along and elevated comedy to a brand-new level".^[22]

Technique

 

Theater program from 1961

Among the qualities of their act, which according to one writer made them a rarity, was that they used both "snob and mob appeal," which gave them a wide audience. Nachman explains that they presented a new kind of comedy team, unlike previous comedy duos which had an intelligent member alongside a much less intelligent one, as with Laurel and Hardy, Fibber McGee and Molly, Burns and Allen, Abbott and Costello, and Martin and Lewis.^[16]: 322

What differentiated their style was the fact that their stage performance created "scenes," a method very unlike the styles of other acting teams. Nor did they rely on fixed gender or comic roles, but instead adapted their own character to fit a sketch idea they came up with. They chose real-life subjects, often from their own life, which were made into satirical and funny vignettes.^[16]: 322

This was accomplished by using subtle joke references which they correctly expected their audiences to recognize, whether through clichés or character types. They thereby indirectly poked fun at the new intellectual culture which they saw growing around them. They felt that young Americans were taking themselves too seriously, which became the subject of much of their satire.^[16]: 321

Nichols structured the material for their skits, and May came up with most of their ideas.^[15] Improvisation became a fairly simple art for them, as they portrayed the urban couple's "Age of Anxiety" in their sketches, and did so on their feet.^[23] According to May, it was simple: "It's nothing more than quickly creating a situation between two people and throwing up some kind of problem for one of them."^[15]

Nichols noted that after coming up with a sketch idea, they would perform it soon after with little extra rehearsal or writing it down. One example he remembered was inspired simply from a phone call from his mother. I called Elaine and I said, "I've got a really good piece for us tonight." They created a six-minute-long, mostly improvised, "mother and son" sketch, which they performed later that night.^{[16]: 335 [24]}

May helped remove the stereotype of women's roles on stage. Producer David Shepherd notes that she accomplished that partly by not choosing traditional 1950s female roles for her characters, which were often housewives or women working at menial jobs. Instead, she often played the character of a sophisticated woman, such as a doctor, a psychiatrist, or an employer.^[16]: 337 Shepherd notes that "Elaine broke through the psychological restrictions of playing comedy as a woman."^[16]: 322

May and Nichols had different attitudes toward their improvisations, however. Where Nichols always needed to know where a sketch was going and what its ultimate point would be, May preferred exploring ideas as the scene progressed. May says that even when they repeated their improvisations, it was not rote but came from re-creating her original impulse. Such improvisational techniques allowed her to make slight changes during a performance.^[15] Although May had a wider improvisational range than Nichols, he was generally the one to shape the pieces and steer them to their end. For their recordings, he also made the decision of what to delete.^[16]: 323

Team break-up

 

Nichols and May

Audiences were still discovering May and Nichols in 1961, four years after they arrived. However, at the height of their fame, they decided to discontinue their act that year and took their careers in different directions: Nichols became a leading Broadway stage and film director; May became primarily a screenwriter and playwright, with some acting and directing. Among the reasons they decided to call it quits was that keeping their act fresh was becoming more difficult. Nichols explained:

Several things happened. One was that I, more than Elaine, became more and more afraid of our improvisational material. She was always brave. We never wrote a skit, we just sort of outlined it: I'll try to make you, or we'll fight—whatever it was. We found ourselves doing the same material over and over, especially in our Broadway show. This took a great toll on Elaine.^[16]: 349

"Nichols and May are perhaps the most ardently missed of all the satirical comedians of their era. When Nichols and May split up, they left no imitators, no descendants, no blueprints or footprints to follow. No one could touch them."

Author Gerald Nachman^[16]: 319

Nichols said that for him personally the breakup was "cataclysmic", and he went into a state of depression: "I didn't know what I was or who I was." It was not until 1996, thirty-five years later, that they would work together again as a team, when she wrote the screenplay and he directed The Birdcage. It "was like coming home, like getting a piece of yourself back that you thought you'd lost," he said.^[16]: 353 He adds that May had been very important to him from the moment he first saw her,^[16]: 325 adding that for her "improv was innate," and few people have that gift.^[16]: 359

Director Arthur Penn said of their sudden breakup, "They set the standard and then they had to move on."^[16]: 351 To New York talk show host Dick Cavett, "They were one of the comic meteors in the sky."^[16]: 348

They reunited for a Madison Square Garden benefit for George McGovern for President in June, 1972. The event, titled "Together Again for McGovern," also featured two musical groups that had recently broken up, Simon and Garfunkel and Peter, Paul and Mary, as well as singer Dionne Warwick.^{[citation needed]}

Playwriting

Following the break-up, May wrote several plays. Her greatest success was the one-act Adaptation. Other stage plays she has written include Not Enough Rope, Mr Gogol and Mr Preen, Hotline (which was performed off-Broadway in 1995 as part of the anthology play Death Defying Acts), After the Night and the Music, Power Plays, Taller Than A Dwarf, The Way of All Fish, and Adult Entertainment. In 1969 she directed the off-Broadway production of Adaptation/Next.

In 2002 Stanley Donen directed her musical play Adult Entertainment with Jeannie Berlin and Danny Aiello at Variety Arts Theater in Manhattan.^[25]

May wrote the one-act play George is Dead, which starred Marlo Thomas and was performed on Broadway from late 2011 into 2012 as part of the anthology play Relatively Speaking along with two other plays by Woody Allen and Joel Coen, directed by John Turturro.^[26][27]

Film career

Directing

May made her film writing and directing debut in 1971 with A New Leaf, a black comedy based on Jack Ritchie's short story The Green Heart, which she read in an Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. (Ritchie would later retitle the story A New Leaf.) The unconventional 'romance' starred Walter Matthau as a Manhattan bachelor faced with bankruptcy and May herself as the wealthy but nerdy botanist he cynically romances and marries in order to salvage his extravagant lifestyle. Director May originally submitted a 180-minute work to Paramount, but the studio cut it back by nearly 80 minutes for release.^{[citation needed]}

May quickly followed her debut film with 1972's The Heartbreak Kid. She limited her role to directing, using a screenplay by Neil Simon, based on a story by Bruce Jay Friedman. The film starred Charles Grodin, Cybill Shepherd, Eddie Albert, and May's own daughter, Jeannie Berlin. It was a major critical success, and holds a 90% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In 2000, it was listed at No. 91 on AFI's 100 Years... 100 Laughs list.^[28]

May followed the two comedies by writing and directing the gangster film Mikey and Nicky, starring Peter Falk and John Cassavetes. Budgeted at $1.8 million and scheduled for a summer 1975 release, the film cost $4.3 million and was not released until December 1976.^{[citation needed]} May ended up in a legal battle with Paramount Pictures over post-production costs, at one point hiding reels of the film in her husband's friend's Connecticut garage and later suing the company for $8 million for breach of contract.^[29] May worked with Julian Schlossberg to get the rights to the film and released a director's cut in 1980. In 2019, May worked with The Criterion Collection to create the newest director's cut. The film has gained appreciation by many critics and audiences in recent years.^[30][31]

Warren Beatty worked with May on the comedy Ishtar (1987), starring Beatty and Dustin Hoffman. Largely shot on location in Morocco, the production was beset by creative differences among the principals and had cost overruns. Long before the picture was ready for release, the troubled production had become the subject of numerous press stories, including a long cover article in New York magazine. Some of the opposition to the film came from David Puttnam, the studio head,^[32][33] making Ishtar a prime example of studio suicide. The advance publicity was largely negative^[34] and, despite some positive reviews from the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, the film was a box office disaster.^[35][36]

The film Ishtar has been positively re-evaluated in the 21st century by multiple publications including the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Indiewire, and The Dissolve.^{[37][38][39][40][41]} Richard Brody of The New Yorker called Ishtar a "wrongly maligned masterwork" and raved, "There's a level of invention, a depth of reflection, and a tangle of emotions in Ishtar which are reached by few films and few filmmakers."^[42]

May did not direct another film for 29 years, when she directed the TV documentary Mike Nichols: American Masters in 2016.^[43]

Writing

In addition to writing three of the films she directed, Elaine May received an Oscar nomination for updating the 1941 film Here Comes Mr. Jordan as Heaven Can Wait (1978). She contributed (uncredited) to the screenplay for the 1982 megahit Tootsie, notably the scenes involving the character played by Bill Murray. She also contributed to the screenplay for the drama Dangerous Minds (1995).^[44]

May reunited with her former comic partner, Mike Nichols, for the 1996 film The Birdcage, an American adaptation of the classic French farce La Cage aux Folles. Their film relocated the story from France to South Beach, Miami. It was a major box office hit. May received her second Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay when she again worked with Nichols on the 1998 film Primary Colors.

In December 2013, Stanley Donen was reported to be in pre-production for a new film, co-written with May, to be produced by Nichols. A table reading of the script for potential investors included such actors as Christopher Walken, Charles Grodin, Ron Rifkin, and Jeannie Berlin.^[45] Nichols died in 2014, however, and Donen died in 2019.

Acting

May has also acted in comedy films, including Enter Laughing (1967), directed by Carl Reiner, and Luv (1967), costarring Peter Falk and Jack Lemmon. The latter film was not well received by critics, although Lemmon said he enjoyed working alongside May: "She's the finest actress I've ever worked with," he said. "And I've never expressed an opinion about a leading lady before... I think Elaine is touched with genius. She approaches a scene like a director and a writer."^[15]

Film scholar Gwendolyn Audrey Foster notes that May is drawn to material that borders on dry Yiddish humor. As such, it has not always been well received at the box office. Her style of humor, in writing or acting, often has more to do with traditional Yiddish theater than traditional Hollywood cinema.^[46]

May starred in A New Leaf (1971), which she also wrote and directed. The dark comedy also co-starred Walter Matthau. Vincent Canby called it "a beautifully and gently cockeyed movie that recalls at least two different traditions of American film comedy... The entire project is touched by a fine and knowing madness."^[47] May received a Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of botanist Henrietta Lowell. In Herbert Ross's California Suite (1978), written by Neil Simon, she was reunited with A New Leaf co-star Walter Matthau, playing his wife Millie.^[48] May acted in the film In the Spirit (1990), in which she played a "shopaholic stripped of consumer power"; Robert Pardi has described her portrayal as a "study of fraying equanimity [that] is a classic comic tour de force."^[49]

May reunited with Nichols for a stage production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in New Haven in 1980.

She appeared in Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks (2000) where she played the character May Sloane, which Allen named after May when he wrote it, and with May being his first choice for the part.^[50] For her acting, she won the National Society of Film Critics award for Best Supporting Actress.^[51] Allen spoke of her as a genius, and of his ease of working with her: "She shows up on time, she knows her lines, she can ad-lib creatively, and is willing to. If you don't want her to, she won't. She's a dream. She puts herself in your hands. She's a genius, and I don't use that word casually."^[50] Nearly 15 years later, Allen ended up casting her to play his wife, Kay Munsinger, in his Amazon limited series, Crisis in Six Scenes, which was released in 2016.^{[citation needed]}

Later career

In 2016, she starred alongside her friend Woody Allen in his series Crisis in Six Scenes on Amazon Prime,^[52] which was her first role since Allen's Small Time Crooks.

In 2018, May returned to Broadway after 60 years in a Lila Neugebauer-directed revival of Kenneth Lonergan's play The Waverly Gallery opposite Lucas Hedges, Joan Allen, and Michael Cera. The play ran at the John Golden Theatre, the same theatre where Nichols and May started almost 60 years ago.^[8] May received rapturous reviews for her performance as the gregarious, dementia-ridden elderly gallery owner Gladys Green, with many critics remarking that she was giving one of the most extraordinary performances they had ever seen onstage. The show received a nomination for the Tony Award for Best Revival of a Play,^[9] while May herself won for the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her performance.^[10] She became the second oldest performer to win a Tony Award for acting.^[11]

In 2019, it was announced that May is set to direct her first narrative feature in over 30 years. Little is known about the project other than its title, Crackpot, and that it is set to star Dakota Johnson, who announced the project at the 2019 Governors Awards.^[53][54]

Work

Film

Year	Title	Credit(s)	Role	Notes
1967	Enter Laughing	Actor	Angela Marlowe
1967	Luv	Actor	Ellen Manville
1967	The Graduate	Actor	Girl with note for Benjamin	Uncredited
1967	Bach to Bach	Actor, writer	Woman	Short film
1971	A New Leaf	Actor, writer, director	Henrietta Lowell
1971	Such Good Friends	Writer	—	Under pseudonym, Esther Dale
1972	The Heartbreak Kid	Director	—
1976	Mikey and Nicky	Writer, director, actor	Woman on TV (voice)	Uncredited as actor
1978	Heaven Can Wait	Co-writer	—
1978	California Suite	Actor	Millie Michaels
1981	Reds	Co-writer	—	Uncredited
1982	Tootsie	Co-writer	—	Uncredited
1986	Labyrinth	Co-writer	—	Uncredited
1987	Ishtar	Writer, director	—
1990	In the Spirit	Actor	Marianne Flan
1994	Wolf	Actor	Operator (voice)	Uncredited
1995	Dangerous Minds	Co-writer	—	Uncredited
1996	The Birdcage	Writer	—
1998	Primary Colors	Writer	—
2000	Small Time Crooks	Actor	May

Television

Year	Title	Credit(s)	Role	Notes
1958	Omnibus	Performer	Herself	Episode: "The Suburban Review"
1958	DuPont Show of the Month	Actor	Candy Carter	Episode: "The Red Mill"
1959–60	The Tonight Show with Jack Paar	Herself	Guest	5 episodes
1960	What's My Line?	Herself	Mystery Guest	Episode: "Elaine May & Mike Nichols"
1962	President Kennedy's Birthday Salute	Performer	Herself	Television special
1964–65	The Jack Paar Program	Herself	Guest	6 episodes
1966	The Merv Griffin Show	Herself	Guest	Episode: "Peter Falk, Elaine May, & Mike Nichols"
1967	The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour	Performer	Herself	Episode: #1.9
1996	Nichols and May: Take Two	Herself	Archival footage	American Masters documentary
2008	AFI: Tribute to Warren Beatty	Performer	Herself	Television special
2010	AFI: Tribute to Mike Nichols	Performer	Herself	Television special
2016	American Masters: Mike Nichols	Director	—	Television documentary
2016	Crisis in Six Scenes	Actor	Kay Munsinger	6 episodes
2021	The Good Fight	Actor	Ruth Bader Ginsburg	2 episodes

Theatre

Year	Title	Credit(s)	Notes
1960	An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May	Playwright, Performer	John Golden Theatre, Broadway
1962	3 x 3	Playwright	Maidman Playhouse, Off-Broadway
1966	The Office	Performer	Henry Miller's Theatre, Broadway
1969	Adaptation	Playwright, Director	Greenwich Mews Theatre, Off Broadway
1980	Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?	Performer (Martha)	Long Wharf Theatre
1991	Mr. Gogol and Mr. Preen	Playwright	Newhouse Theatre, Off Broadway
1992	Mike Nichols and Elaine May Together Again	Playwright, Performer	Brooks Atkinson Theatre, Broadway
1995	Death Defying Acts: Hotline	Playwright	Variety Arts Theatre, Off Broadway
1998	Power Plays	Playwright, Performer	Promenade Theatre, Off Broadway
2000	Taller Than a Dwarf	Playwright	Longacre Theater, Broadway
2002	Small Talks on the Universe	Playwright	Eugene O'Neill Theatre, Broadway
2002	Adult Entertainment	Playwright	Variety Arts Theatre, Off Broadway
2005	After the Night and the Music	Playwright	Samuel J. Friedman Theatre, Broadway
2011	Relatively Speaking: George is Dead	Playwright	Brooks Atkinson Theatre, Broadway
2018	The Waverly Gallery	Performer (Gladys Green)	John Golden Theatre, Broadway

Discography

• Improvisations to Music (1958) Mercury^[55] ASIN B000W0V9BW
• An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May (1960) Mercury ASIN B000W06CCS
• Mike Nichols & Elaine May Examine Doctors (1961) Mercury MG 20680/SR 60680 ASIN B000W0AGDY
• In Retrospect (1962) Polygram, compilation, re-released as compact disc in 1996 ASIN B000001EKT

Influence and legacy

Nichols and May created a new "Age of Irony" for comedy, which showed actors arguing contemporary banalities as a key part of their routine. That style of comedy was picked up and further developed by later comics such as Steve Martin, Bill Murray, and David Letterman.^[16]: 323 According to Martin, Nichols and May were among the first to satirize relationships. The word "relationship," notes Martin, was first used in the early sixties: "It was the first time I ever heard it satirized."^[16]: 323 He recalls that soon after discovering their recorded acts, he went to sleep each night listening to them. "They influenced us all and changed the face of comedy."^[16]: 324

In Vanity Fair, Woody Allen declared, "Individually, each one is a genius, and when they worked together, the sum was even greater than the combination of the parts—the two of them came along and elevated comedy to a brand-new level."^[56]

Lily Tomlin was also affected by their routines and considers May to be her inspiration as a comedian: "There was nothing like Elaine May, with her voice, her timing, and her attitude," says Tomlin.^[57]: 43 "The nuances of the characterizations and the cultured types that they were doing completely appealed to me. They were the first people I saw doing smart, hip character pieces. My brother and I used to keep their 'Improvisations to Music' on the turntable twenty-four hours a day."^[16]: 324

In an interview with Pitchfork Magazine, standup comedian John Mulaney, described Mike Nichols & Elaine May Examine Doctors (1961) as one of his favorite comedy albums of all time.^[58] Mulaney stated, "I got this album for Christmas when I was in junior high. The last track, 'Nichols and May at Work,' is an outtake from recording the album, they were just improvising dialog in a studio. They’re trying to do a piece where a son goes to his mother and says that he wants to become a registered nurse. It’s something you just have to experience, because two people that funny laughing that hard is really, really, really funny. I think it might be the happiest thing ever recorded."^[58]

Filmmaker and film historian Peter Bogdanovich covered Elaine's filmography in his book Movie of the Week (1999). Bogdanovich praised all of her films and concluded with "Long live Elaine! Would that she could act and direct again in pictures. In 1998 I saw her perform off-Broadway in a couple of one-act plays she wrote (Power Plays), and her performances matched the comic genius of the writing."^[59] Other admirers of May's work include comedian Patton Oswalt, and directors Ben and Josh Safdie who both detailed their admiration for her and her work, in particular her film Mikey and Nicky (1976) through The Criterion Channel.

May's work as a director has been given a closer look in recent years with David Hudson, a writer for The Criterion Collection declaring her as a "criminally underappreciated moviemaker".^[60]

In 2017 the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle created an award in her name given "to a deserving person or film that brings awareness to women’s issues".^[61]

Awards and honors

Main article: List of awards and nominations received by Elaine May

 

May receiving the Medal of Arts award from President Obama, July 13, 2013^[62]

For her acting, her accolades include a nomination for a Golden Globe award for Best Actress in a musical or comedy for A New Leaf (1971),^[63] and winning the National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress for her role in Small Time Crooks (2000).^[51]

May was awarded the National Medal of Arts for her lifetime contributions to American comedy by President Barack Obama, in a ceremony in the White House on July 10, 2013. She was awarded for her "groundbreaking wit and a keen understanding of how humor can illuminate our lives, Ms. May has evoked untold joy, challenged expectations, and elevated spirits across our Nation."^[64]

In January 2016, the Writers Guild of America-West announced that May would receive its 2016 Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement at the Writers Guild of America Award ceremony in Los Angeles on February 13.^[65][66][67]

On June 9, 2019, May won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her performance as Gladys in the Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan's The Waverly Gallery. She also received a Drama League Award nomination and won a Drama Desk Award and an Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play.^[68] That same year, May's film A New Leaf was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".^[69]

In 2021, she was chosen to receive the Honorary Academy Award by the Board of Governors of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, receiving the award for her "bold, uncompromising approach to filmmaking, as a writer, director and actress". She was honored at the annual Governors Awards alongside Samuel L. Jackson, Liv Ullman, and Danny Glover on March 25, 2022.^{[3][4][5][70]} Bill Murray presented her with the award crediting her with "saving his life on multiple occasions professionally".^[71]

References

1. "Tony Kushner, Anna Deavere Smith, Joan Didion and Elaine May Among National Medal of Arts and Humanities Recipients". Playbill. Retrieved April 2, 2023.
2. "Academy Awards Database Search : Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences". awardsdatabase.oscars.org. Retrieved 2022-12-31.
3. Beckett, Lois (March 26, 2022). "'This is going to be cherished': Samuel L Jackson and Elaine May receive honorary Oscars". The Guardian. Retrieved March 26, 2022.
4. Willis, Courtney (March 26, 2022). "Samuel L. Jackson, Danny Glover honored at Governors Awards". The Grio. Retrieved March 26, 2022.
5. "Samuel L. Jackson, Elaine May, Liv Ullmann to Receive Honorary Oscars; Danny Glover to Get Jean Hersholt Award". The Hollywood Reporter. 24 June 2021. Retrieved June 24, 2021.
6. Dargis, Manohla (21 January 2019). "The Marvelous Mrs. Elaine May". The New York Times. Retrieved June 25, 2021.
7. McNary, Dave (19 January 2016). "Elaine May Honored by Writers Guild of America". Retrieved 16 July 2018.
8. Elaine May Playbill (vault)
9. "Theater Review. 'Waverly Gallery'" The New York Times, October 25, 2018
10. Evans, Greg; Hayes, Dade (2019-06-09). "Deadline's Tony Awards Live Blog". Deadline. Retrieved 2019-06-10.
11. Kare, Jeffrey (10 June 2019). "2019 Tony Awards: 24 records, milestones and fun facts about this year's winners". Gold Derby. Retrieved June 10, 2019.
12. "Academy Awards Database Search : Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences". awardsdatabase.oscars.org. Retrieved 2022-12-31.
13. Quart, Barbara Koenig (1988). "American Women Directors (Chapter 3)". Women Directors: The Emergence of a New Cinema. New York, NY, USA: Greenwood-Prager. pp. 37–51 and passim. ISBN 0313391106. Retrieved 31 January 2016.
14. "Person Details for Marvin May, "California, County Marriages, 1850-1952" — FamilySearch.org". familysearch.org. Retrieved February 1, 2016.
15. Thompson, Thomas (1967). "What Ever Happened to Elaine May?" (print). Life. Vol. 63, no. 4, July 28. pp. 54–59. ISSN 0024-3019. Retrieved 31 January 2016. Since She and Mike Nichols Broke Up Their Famous Comedy Team, She has had Flops, Problems and Now, at Last, a New Success.
16. Nachman, Gerald (2003). "Double Jeopardy: Mike Nichols and Elaine May". Seriously Funny: The Rebel Comedians of the 1950s and 1960s. New York, NY: Pantheon Books. ISBN 978-0-375-41030-7. OCLC 50339527.
17. Feeney, Mark (2009). "Like His Films, Donen Exudes Style and Wit" (online). The Boston Globe. No. October 4. pp. 1–3, esp. 3. Retrieved 31 January 2016. Subtitle: Famed director Stanley Donen, the subject of a retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive, visits this week.
18. Heilpern, John (2013). Tim Shaeffer, illustrations. "Hollywood Conversations: Out to Lunch with Stanley Donen" (online, print). Vanity Fair (February 28 (March, print)). Retrieved 31 January 2016. Subtitle: The last of the golden-age Hollywood directors still believes in romance.
19. Seham, Amy E. (2001). "The First-Wave Paradigm (Chapter 1)". Whose Improv Is It Anyway?: Beyond Second City. Jackson, MS, USA: University Press of Mississippi. pp. 11, 14–16, 229. ISBN 160473759X. Retrieved 31 January 2016.
20. FilmArchivesNYC (13 March 2009). "Elaine May & Mike Nichols Commercial (stock footage / archival footage)". Retrieved 29 July 2018 – via YouTube.
21. "Elaine May and Mike Nichols on Tax Day". 15 April 2016. Retrieved 29 July 2018 – via YouTube.
22. "Exclusive: The Reunion of Mike Nichols and Elaine May". Vanity Fair. 20 December 2012.
23. Kashner, Sam (2008). "The Movies: Here's to You, Mr. Nichols, The Making of The Graduate" (online, print). Vanity Fair (February 29). Retrieved 31 January 2016. Reprinted in Graydon Carter's Vanity Fair's Tales of Hollywood: Rebels, Reds, and Graduates,, New York, NT, USA: Penguin, p. 169ff.
24. Nichols, Mike & May, Elaine, acting; Arthur Penn, producer (1998) [1960]. "Mother and Son [track 4]". An Evening With Mike Nichols And Elaine May (Original Cast Recording) (audio CD [vinyl]). New York, NY, USA [Chicago, IL, USA]: PolyGram Records [Mercury Records]. ASIN B000007Q8O. Retrieved 31 January 2016.
25. Brantley, Ben (2002). "Theater Review: Is She a Serious Actress? XXXtremely" (online). The New York Times (December 12). Retrieved 31 January 2016. Good acting is pretty common to the American stage and screen; bad acting, perhaps, even more so… / A master class in this delicate art is now being offered by Jeannie Berlin, who is appearing in Elaine May's Adult Entertainment, the often very funny, overstretched comedy sketch that opened last night at the Variety Arts Theater under the direction of Stanley Donen.
26. Isherwood, Charles (2011). "Each Family, Tortured in Its Own Way" (online). The New York Times (October 20). Retrieved 31 January 2016. Mothers come in for some serious savaging in "Relatively Speaking," a reasonably savory tasting platter of comedies by Ethan Coen, Elaine May and Woody Allen that opened on Thursday night at the Brooks Atkinson Theater… / These plays are not going to do anything much in the way of reputation burnishing for their three celebrated authors — and certainly none is required — but they are packed with nifty zingers and have been directed by John Turturro with a boisterous flair for socking home the borscht-belt humor. / Ms. May's "George Is Dead" is, for most of its running time, a delicious study in the bliss of narcissism… Marlo Thomas plays a pampered princess named Doreen who comes …that her husband has just been killed.
27. "BWW TV: Meet the Company of Woody Allen, Ethan Coen, Elaine May's Relatively Speaking!". 27 December 2011. Retrieved 30 July 2018 – via YouTube.
28. (PDF). American Film Institute. June 13, 2000. Archived from the original (PDF) on March 16, 2013. Retrieved August 29, 2022.
29. Lang, Brent (2021-04-21). "As Elaine May Turns 89, It's Time to Give the Filmmaking Giant the Credit She Deserves". Variety. Retrieved 2022-12-18.
30. Hoberman, J. (2019-07-02). "In 'Mikey and Nicky,' Elaine May Nails a Pair of Desperate Characters". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2022-12-18.
31. LaSalle, Mick (September 1, 2022). "Elaine May's 'Mikey and Nicky' is an unsung gem from the 1970s". Datebook | San Francisco Arts & Entertainment Guide. Retrieved 2022-12-18.
32. Chung, Evan (7 June 2019). "Ishtar Didn't Die a Natural Death". Slate. Retrieved 2022-05-28.
33. Brueggemann, Tom (17 May 2020). "'Ishtar': How Hollywood Decided That One Box-Office Flop Spoke for All Female Directors". IndieWire. Retrieved 2022-05-28.
34. "Ishtar". Metacritic.
35. Harmetz, Aljean (May 19, 1987). "Elaine May's 'Ishtar': A$51 Million Film in Trouble". The New York Times. Retrieved 29 August 2022.
36. Biskind, Peter (2010). Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America. Simon & Schuster. p. 382. ISBN 9780743246583.
37. Murray, Noel (August 6, 2013). "Ishtar". The Dissolve.
38. Labuza, Peter (November 13, 2012). . Indiewire. Archived from the original on March 5, 2016. Retrieved February 24, 2016.
39. Hillis, Aaron (August 6, 2013). . Indiewire. Archived from the original on March 5, 2016. Retrieved February 24, 2016.
40. Haglund, David (August 6, 2013). "Ishtar Is Finally on Blu-ray. And It's Good!". Slate's Culture Blog.
41. Olsen, Mark (August 11, 2013). "'Ishtar' rises from the ashes on Blu-ray". Los Angeles Times.
42. "Elaine May Talks About "Ishtar"". The New Yorker. April 1, 2016.
43. "Elaine May’s ‘American Masters’ Documentary on Mike Nichols", The Film Stage, Feb. 1, 2016
44. "Unpacking the short but prickly filmography of Elaine May". AV Club. 24 January 2013. Retrieved June 9, 2018.
45. . moviepilot.com. December 3, 2013. Archived from the original on October 17, 2014. Retrieved December 14, 2013.
46. Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey. Women Film Directors: An International Bio-critical Dictionary, Greenwood Publishing (1995) p. 246
47. Canby, Vincent, "A New Leaf (1971): Love Turns 'New Leaf' at Music Hall", The New York Times, March 12, 1971. Retrieved 2011-01-02.
48. California Suite(1978) - Walter Matthau Tribute. August 30, 2013. Retrieved February 1, 2016 – via YouTube.
49. Pardi, Robert (2016). "Elaine May Biography". Elaine May Films… Filmography… Biography… Career… Awards (online). Filmdirectorssite.com. Retrieved 31 January 2016.
50. Lax, Eric. Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking, Knopf Doubleday Publishing (2007) p. 161
51. Awards and Nominations for Small Time Crooks, Woody Allen Movies
52. Fleming, Mike Jr. (January 25, 2016). "Woody Allen Amazon Series Sets Cast: He Stars With Elaine May & Miley Cyrus". Deadline Hollywood. Penske Business Media. Retrieved 25 April 2016.
53. "Elaine May to Direct her First Narrative Feature in 30 Years with Dakota Johnson". The Film Stage. 2 November 2019. Retrieved March 14, 2020.
54. Hoffman, Jordan (November 2, 2019). "Elaine May age 87 to direct new film". Vanity Fair. Retrieved March 14, 2020.
55. Anon. (December 15, 1958). "Sold Out". Billboard. p. 17. Retrieved June 5, 2018.
56. Exclusive: The Reunion of Mike Nichols and Elaine May | Vanity Fair
57. Lavin, Suzanne (2004). "Overview (Chapter 1)". Women and Comedy in Solo Performance: Phyllis Diller, Lily Tomlin and Roseanne. New York, NY, USA: Routledge-Taylor & Francis. pp. 2, 9f, 43. ISBN 0203643461. Retrieved 31 January 2016.
58. The Pitch
59. Bogdanovich, Peter. Movie of the Week. p. 137
60. "Elaine May, "Criminally Underappreciated Moviemaker"". The Criterion Collection. Retrieved May 13, 2020.
61. "PFCC Annual Awards".
62. "President Obama Awards the 2012 National Medals of Arts and Humanities". 10 July 2013. Retrieved 16 July 2018 – via YouTube.
63. DiMare, Philip C. Movies in American History: An Encyclopedia, Volume 1, ABC-CLIO (2011) pp. 738-739
64. "President Obama to Award 2012 National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal". whitehouse.gov. 3 July 2013. Retrieved February 1, 2016 – via National Archives.
65. Petski, Denise (2016). "Elaine May To Receive WGA Screenwriting Honor" (online). Deadline Hollywood (January 19). Retrieved 31 January 2016. Comedy screenwriter-director-actress Elaine May will receive the WGAW's 2016 Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement at the WGA Awards L.A. ceremony on February 13.
66. McNary, Dave (2016). "Elaine May Honored by Writers Guild of America" (online). Variety (January 19). Retrieved 31 January 2016. Elaine May will receive the Writers Guild of America West's Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement to honor her career and body of work.
67. "Screenwriter Robert Towne presents the 2016 Screen Laurel Award to Elaine May". 14 February 2016. Retrieved 29 July 2018 – via YouTube.
68. Staff. " 'Hadestown' Leads the Outer Critics Circle Awards With 6 Wins" Playbill, May 13, 2019
69. Chow, Andrew R. (December 11, 2019). "See the 25 New Additions to the National Film Registry, From Purple Rain to Clerks". Time. New York, NY. Retrieved December 11, 2019.
70. Dury, Sharareh (March 24, 2022). "Academy Honors Legacy Troupe Ahead of Governors Awards". Variety. Retrieved March 26, 2022.
71. "Bill Murray honors Elaine May at the 2022 Governors Awards". Oscars. Retrieved June 16, 2022.

Further reading

• Quart, Barbara Koenig (1988). "American Women Directors (Chapter 3)". Women Directors: The Emergence of a New Cinema. New York: Greenwood-Prager. pp. 37–51 and passim. ISBN 0313391106. Retrieved 31 January 2016.
• Stephens, Chuck. "Chronicle of a Disappearance: Unjustly Omitted from Most Histories of Seventies American Filmmaking, Actor-writer-director Elaine May--and the Four Unforgettable Films She Somehow Got Away With--refuse to Fade Away." Film Comment 42.2 (2006): 46. Web.

External links

 

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Elaine May.

• Elaine May at IMDb
• Elaine May at the Internet Broadway Database
• Elaine Berlin at the Internet Broadway Database
• Elaine May - Provided to YouTube by Universal Music Group North America