Elaine May

Elaine May (born April 21, 1932, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.) is an American comedian, actor, writer, and director who is known for her sardonic wit, her caustic view of human nature, and her uncompromising fearlessness in all her work.

May’s parents were Yiddish vaudevillians, and she spent much of her childhood traveling with her father’s theatre company and occasionally performing in it. (It must be noted that she once declared that biographical details written about her early life were not entirely true.) Her father died when she was about 12 years old, and she and her mother then moved to Los Angeles. She dropped out of high school and married at the age of 16. Her only child, actress Jeannie Berlin, was born when May was 18. May also studied acting under Maria Ouspenskaya.

Having heard that the University of Chicago would accept students who did not have a high-school diploma, May hitchhiked to Chicago in 1952. She audited classes and argued with professors but did not enroll. At the university she met Paul Sills and Mike Nichols and eventually became a founding member of the pioneering improv theatre troupe the Compass Players. May proved to be a gifted and dauntless improviser, with Nichols as her best partner. In 1957 Nichols and May left the Compass Players to work as a comedy duo in New York City, creating a stage show that consisted of largely improvised sketches based on their own ideas, mostly spoofing contemporary foibles. The groundbreaking act proved popular, and its reach was augmented by TV appearances. An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May opened on Broadway in 1960 and ran for nearly nine months. They also released comedy albums, including Improvisations to Music (1959) and a 1960 album with the same name as the Broadway show, the latter of which won a Grammy Award. However, Nichols’s preference for structure and May’s increasing daringness in her improv led to the act’s breakup in 1961.

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May attempted to launch a career as a playwright with little success, though she wrote several plays. In 1967 she played a supporting role in Carl Reiner’s movie Enter Laughing and starred with Peter Falk and Jack Lemmon in Luv, a movie version of a hit play. Her one-act play Adaptation, which she also directed, became an Off-Broadway hit in 1969. May launched her career as a filmmaker with A New Leaf (1971), which she wrote (from a short story by Jack Ritchie), directed, and starred in with Walter Matthau. The comedy—about a man who has burned through his inheritance and plans to marry and kill a wealthy and socially inept botanist—received good reviews and was a minor hit. However, May was dissatisfied with the version the studio released, which was shorter than her final cut. She then directed The Heartbreak Kid (1972), from a script by Neil Simon, about a man (Charles Grodin) who, while on his honeymoon with his clumsy bride (Jeannie Berlin), falls for a blonde beauty (Cybill Shepherd).

May next wrote, directed, and edited Mikey and Nicky (1976), starring Falk and John Cassavetes as childhood friends with mob ties. In a departure for her, the movie was not a comedy, and it went wildly over schedule. May was said to have hidden reels of the film to prevent the studio from re-editing it. When Mikey and Nicky was at last released, it was a disappointment, and May’s career as a filmmaker seemed to be over. After that, she was part of the ensemble cast of the movie California Suite (1978). She also worked with Warren Beatty on the Academy Award-nominated script for his hit comedy Heaven Can Wait (1978) and reportedly helped him with the script for Reds (1981). She also served as an uncredited script doctor on Dustin Hoffman’s Tootsie (1982). Beatty acted as producer when she wrote and directed the comedy Ishtar (1987), which starred Beatty and Hoffman and was one of the most notorious flops in movie history.

In addition to her work in the movie industry, May reunited with Nichols in a well-received stage production of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf in 1980, and in 1992 they returned to Broadway for a single performance, Mike Nichols and Elaine May: Together Again on Broadway. May later contributed a play to the anthology Death Defying Acts (1995), which also featured works by David Mamet and Woody Allen. Returning to film work, May was a major contributor to the screenplay for the movie The Birdcage (1996) and wrote the script for Primary Colors (1998), both of which Nichols directed; she won an Oscar nomination for the latter. She also acted in Allen’s comedy Small Time Crooks (2000).

May enjoyed a renaissance of her career in the 21st century. In 2016 she directed the episode of the TV series American Masters devoted to Nichols, and she also starred with Allen in his miniseries Crisis in Six Scenes. May’s moving performance as a gallery owner with dementia in the 2018–19 Broadway revival of The Waverly Gallery, written by Kenneth Lonergan, won her rave reviews and a Tony Award.

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May was a recipient of the 2012 National Medal of Arts, and in 2022 she was given an honorary Academy Award in recognition of her “bold, uncompromising approach to filmmaking.”