Mike Nichols

Nichols is directing the new Broadway production of Death of a Salesman, which is not an easy business. But maybe one forgets what Nichols has already accomplished:

After the international success of Nichols and May, whose humor often amounted to psychiatry by other means, he reinvented himself as a stage director, making hits of early-sixties Neil Simon comedies like Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple. A Newsweek cover story in 1966 heralded his defection to Hollywood, and though success onstage continued, it’s hard to overstate how much his first four film features—Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Graduate, Catch-22, and Carnal ­Knowledge—helped redefine American moviemaking as the upheavals of the sixties spilled into the seventies.

Apparently he made more money as the original producer of Annie than any of his other Broadway work. He was behind productions as dissimilar as HBO's Angels in America and Broadway's Spamalot. And he's done a million other things. So it's worth reading about him, and about his latest: When in Doubt, Seduce.