Elaine May
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Elaine May (born Elaine Berlin on April 21, 1932 in Philadelphia) is a director, screenwriter, and actress. She achieved her greatest fame, in the 1950s, from her improvisational comedy routines in partnership with Mike Nichols.
Contents |
[edit] Family background
Elaine Berlin was born in Philadelphia on April 21st, 1932, the daughter of the theatre director and actor Jack Berlin and actress Ida Berlin. As a child, Elaine occasionally performed with her father in the Yiddish Theater he ran. In 1942, she moved to Los Angeles, California.
She married Marvin May in the late 1940s and gave birth to a daughter, actress Jeannie Berlin (using her mother's surname), in 1949. She later divorced Marvin. In 1972, she married lyricist Sheldon Harnick, best known for his work in Fiddler On The Roof (1971). However, the two soon divorced in 1973.
During the 1950s, Elaine was friendly with Alexander Horn, who later became known as a leader of an alleged theatre cult in San Francisco.
It is suggested in Janet Coleman's book The Compass that Elaine had a short affair with Mike Nichols early in their association. When Elaine and Mike Nichols were asked by Tommy Smothers at a Comedy Festival in 1999 "so did you guys have an affair or what?" Elaine replied, "Exactly."
[edit] Career
[edit] Stage
In 1947, May studied acting under Maria Ouspenskaya, the veteran theater and screen actress.
In 1950, May attended the University of Chicago and Playwrights Theatre in Chicago.
In 1953, she became a member of the improvisational theatre group The Compass Players, founded by Paul Sills and David Shepherd, which later became The Second City. She remained a member until 1957.
During her membership, May met Mike Nichols, who was starring in one of Sills' plays, and began a successful partnership with him. Together they formed a standup comedic duo, performing in New York clubs and making several TV appearances. In 1960, the duo showcased the Broadway debut of An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May, which won the Grammy Award in 1962 for Best Comedy Performance.
Throughout the 1960s, thanks in part to the successful duet with Nichols, May wrote, directed, and acted in various forms of theatre. In addition, she wrote and performed for radio and recorded several comedy albums. Her work with Nichols during this time was critical to establishing improvisation as a form of comedy.
May formed and directed an improvisational company called The Third Ear in New York that included Reni Santori, Peter Boyle, Renee Taylor, and Louise Lasser. On Tuesday nights the cast would improvise with invited guests, like Mark Gordon who had also been in The Compass.
May also wrote several plays during this period. Her greatest success was the one-act Adaptation. Other stage plays she has written include Not Enough Rope, Mr Gogol And Mr Preen, Hot Line, After the Night and the Music, Power Plays, Taller Than A Dwarf, and Adult Entertainment. She also directed the off-Broadway production of Adaptation/Next.
Nichols and May starred together in a stage version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Long Wharf Theatre in 1980. Nichols had directed the film version in 1966.
[edit] Film
[edit] Directing
May made her film writing and directing debut in 1971 with the cult classic A New Leaf, a zany update on 1930s screwball comedy starring Walter Matthau and her. Originally, May handed in a 180-minute black comedy that the studio cut and sweetened into a 102-minute weird romance. It is unknown if the original cut exists.
In her second directorial effort, May found great success with The Heartbreak Kid. The film was a critically lauded and modestly popular comedy with an original screenplay by Neil Simon, featuring hilarious performances from Charles Grodin, Eddie Albert, and May's own daughter, actress Jeannie Berlin.
May followed up these two comedies with a bleak crime story entitled Mikey and Nicky in 1976. The film features strong performances from John Cassavetes and Peter Falk.
May’s next directorial effort Ishtar (1987) was her last. Largely shot on location in the Middle East, the production was beset by internal difficulties, and advance publicity was so negative that the picture never got off the ground, becoming one of the biggest cinematic failures of its day.
[edit] Writing
May received an Oscar nomination for updating Here comes Mr. Jordan as Heaven Can Wait.
May reunited with her comedic sidekick Mike Nichols with “The Birdcage” in 1996. The film was a relocating of the classic French farce “La Cage aux Folles” to South Beach, Florida.
May received her second Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay when she re-teamed once again with Nichols on “Primary Colors” in 1997.
[edit] Filmography
[edit] Films as writer
- Such Good Friends (1971) - Under the pseudonym Esther Dale
- Heaven Can Wait (1978) - Co-Writer (Oscar nominee and WGA winner)
- Reds (1981) - Co-Writer (Uncredited)
- Tootsie (1982) - Co-Writer (Uncredited)
- Labyrinth (1986) - Co-Writer (Uncredited)
- Dangerous Minds (1995) - Co-Writer (Uncredited)
- The Birdcage (1996) (WGA nominee)
- Primary Colors (1998) (Oscar nominee and WGA nominee)
[edit] Films as writer and director
- A New Leaf (1971) - also role as Henrietta Lowell (WGA nominee)
- Mikey and Nicky (1976)
- Ishtar (1987)
[edit] Films as director
[edit] Films as actress
- Enter Laughing (1966) - as Angela
- Luv (1967) - as Ellen Manville
- Bach to Bach (1967) - as a Woman
- A New Leaf (1971) - as Henrietta Lowell (Golden Globe nominee, Best Actress (musical or comedy))
- California Suite (1978) - as Millie Michaels
- In the Spirit (1990) - as Marianne Flan
- Small Time Crooks (2000) - as May (National Society of Film Critics winner, Best Supporting Actress)
[edit] Quotes and Anecdotes
"To actually make something that isn't boring is sort of hard to do."
"The only safe thing is to take a chance."
"It's only a moral question. I'm interested in real questions."
"The actor's job is to justify."
"When in doubt, seduce."
"When I saw my first movie budget during A New Leaf, I thought, "This is a really crazy industry. You wouldn't be able to open a fruit stand this way."
"Every movie I made except for The Heartbreak Kid, the studio changed regimes in the middle of the movie."
"Yes, there is truth in movies. No, movies are not like life."
"(People) adapt very quickly to being treated very badly. We just take it."
"I have nothing to say that everybody doesn't know already. I just want everybody to see it the way I do."
"I don't like Broadway. I think it's worse than the movies. But Joe Papp has a terrific theatre and I'm going to work in it."
"If all of the people who hate Ishtar had seen it, I would be a rich woman today."
"You can do something dramatically or you can do it funny. Funny is closer to life."
"There are some (budding screenwriters) who have a real dream and a real goal, and it’s so overwhelming to think, after you finished (a screenplay), what do you do, and then where do you go? It’s such a big world now. It’s so hard to do anything. It’s so hard to get anyone on the phone. It’s so hard to return a piece of furniture... It’s almost impossible."
"Comedy is almost entirely the doing of something in detail, step by tiny step. Drama sort of sweeps everything away."
"When you speak about having moments that are really like life—“What is it really like when you lose someone? What is it really like when you’re happy?” There are very few moments like that in movies. They all pretend. When you see a real moment in a movie, it’s almost shocking."
"Well all these ideas sound great for some movie, but they go completely against the ecology of this movie as it now exists, and you'll never pull it off." - said to Warner Brothers executives who wanted to, and eventually did, alter Jonathan Demme's Swing Shift. Jonathan Demme particularly liked the phrase, "ecology of a movie."
"We would start various improvisations, then they would be edited -- mostly our hysterical laughter would be taken out." - Mike Nichols on working with Elaine on the radio show "Monitor."
"Elaine and I had a rule -- you can't go to be funny, you have to be doing something else and funny has to be on the way. You can't be caught trying to be nothing but funny." -- Mike Nichols
"Elaine didn't (care) if the audience didn't like her work... She worried when the audience liked it too much." - Mark Gordon
"It was always a shock that (Elaine's Scenarios) would work. You'd get up and do them and they would work." - Mark Gordon
"I do miss that. Those wonderful people who work with you on a movie, and who tell the story with you. That’s the best part of making movies, I think. It’s the only thing where you can work in a group where five or six people all tell the same story in their own specific voice. The music person has a voice. The make-up person makes you up to tell the story… And they all tell the same story. And I miss that because you can’t really do it on the stage."
"Elaine broke through the psychological restrictions of playing comedy as a woman." - David Shephard
"It was like a song: you could listen to it over and over. I used to go to sleep to them at night." - Steve Martin on Nichols and May's recordings.
"She knew everything about the theatre and psychoanalysis. She didn't know anything else. She knew the subtleties of Scandinavian drama, but she didn't know if Mexico was north or south of the United States." - James Sacks
"(Elaine and I) decided that public improvisation first of all had to entertain. At that time we were very Brechtian, so it also had to edify, and perhaps at times even frighten, all of which came under the heading of entertainment for us." - Ted Flicker
"I was terrified of Elaine. Terrified! You have a feeling that at any moment she might kill you." - Severn Darden
"She was very mischievous" - Sid Lazard.
"She hung around (The University of Chicago). She sat in on classes. She never registered. She once convinced an entire philosophy class that everybody in Plato's Symposium was drunk." - Mike Nichols
"She's about fifty percent more brilliant than she needs to be." - Eugene Troobnick
"Elaine May is the most fascinating, maddening girl I ever met. I hope I never see her again." - Richard Burton
(Much of this material comes from Janet Coleman's The Compass, Off-Camera by Leonard Probst, Something Wonderful Right Away by Jeffrey Sweet and various other wonderfully non-litigious sources.)
