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So long a man imagines that he cannot do this or that, so long it is impossible to him. Baruch Spinoza |
Elaine May (born April 21, 1932) is an American film director, screenwriter and actress. She achieved her greatest fame in the 1950s from her improvisational comedy routines in partnership with Mike Nichols. She is a two time Academy Award nominated screenwriter and also the mother of Oscar nominee Jeannie Berlin.
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Elaine Berlin was born in Philadelphia in 1932, the daughter of the theatre director/actor Jack Berlin and his wife, Ida, an actress, who had a small role in May's film, A New Leaf. As a child, Elaine occasionally performed with her father in the Yiddish theater he ran. In 1942, the family moved to Los Angeles.
She married Marvin May in the late 1940s and gave birth to a daughter, actress-director-screenwriter Jeannie Berlin (who is known by her mother's maiden name) in 1949 at age 17; the couple later divorced. In 1962, she married lyricist Sheldon Harnick, best known for his work in Fiddler On The Roof. However, they divorced a year later when May became romantically involved with her psychoanalyst, Dr. David L. Rubinfine. May and Rubinfine remained married until his death in 1982, though they lived separately in later years.
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 then starring in one of Sills' plays, and began a successful partnership with him. Together they formed a standup comic duo Nichols and May, performing in New York clubs and making several TV appearances. In 1960, they made their Broadway debut with An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May; the original-cast album won the Grammy Award in 1962 for Best Comedy Performance.
Throughout the 1960s, thanks in part to the successful work 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 of great importance in establishing improvisation as a form of comedy. Their stage act and records featured just the two voices with a solo pianist (Marty Rubenstein).
May formed and directed an improvisational company called The Third Ear in New York that included Reni Santoni, Peter Boyle, Renee Taylor, and Louise Lasser.
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.
May made her film writing and directing debut in 1971 with A New Leaf, a screwball comedy based on Jack Ritchie's The Green Heart. (Ritchie would later retitle the story after A New Leaf.) The film starred Walter Matthau and May in the lead roles. Originally, May handed in a 180-minute black comedy that the studio cut into a 102-minute weird romance.
Her second directorial effort was The Heartbreak Kid. This comedy was critically lauded and modestly popular, based on a screenplay by Neil Simon, and starring Charles Grodin, Eddie Albert, Cybill Shepherd and May's own daughter, Jeannie Berlin. Albert and Berlin each received Supporting Actor/Actress Oscar nominations for the film.
May followed up these two comedies with the bleak crime drama entitled Mikey and Nicky. Budgeted at $1.8 million and scheduled for a Summer 1975 release, the film ended up costing $4.3 million and not coming out until December 1976. She was eventually fired by Paramount Pictures (the studio that financed the film), but succeeded in getting herself rehired by hiding two reels of the negative until the studio gave in. The film's subsequent failure at the box office assured her banishment from Hollywood, until actor-producer Warren Beatty decided to give her one more chance.
Their collaboration, Ishtar (1987), co-starring Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, was an even more notorious disaster than her previous film. Largely shot on location in Morocco, the production was beset by creative differences among the principals and enormous cost overruns. The advance publicity was largely negative, and despite some positive reviews (Los Angeles Times, Washington Post) the film became known as one of the biggest cinematic disasters of all time. To date, May has not directed another film.
Elaine May received an Oscar nomination for updating Here Comes Mr. Jordan as Heaven Can Wait. May reunited with her former comic partner, Mike Nichols, for The Birdcage in 1996. The film relocated the classic French farce, La Cage aux Folles, from France to South Beach, Miami. May received her second Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay when she again worked with Nichols on Primary Colors in 1997.
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