Biography

He and his younger brother, Robert, fled Berlin, Nazi Germany for the USA in April 1939 due to increasing Nazi atrocities. Their father had already relocated there some years back. The young boys arrived on April 28, 1939 in New York City, where their father, now known as Paul Nichols, had set up a medical practice and become a successful medical practitioner. The boys' mother was reunited with her family the following year in 1940.

According to Jack Nicholson's April 1972 Playboy Magazine interview, Nichols asked Nicholson and other cast members not to smoke marijuana while filming Carnal Knowledge (1971) on location in Vancouver, British Columbia, where cannabis was easily available. Nichols thought that it dulled an actor's performance.

Ninth person and sixth man to receive the status of EGOT. The other recipients are Richard Rodgers, Helen Hayes, Rita Moreno, John Gielgud, Audrey Hepburn, Marvin Hamlisch, Jonathan Tunick, Mel Brooks, Whoopi Goldberg, Scott Rudin, Robert Lopez, Andrew Lloyd Webber, Tim Rice, John Legend, Alan Menken, Jennifer Hudson,Viola Davis and Elton John.

While paying tribute to Nichols during his 2003 Kennedy Center Honors, Meryl Streep and Candace Bergen read Nichols' "Five Rules for Filmmaking": 1: The careful application of terror is an important form of communication. 2: Anything worth fighting for is worth fighting dirty for. 3: There's absolutely no substitute for genuine lack of preparation. 4: If you think there's good in everybody, you haven't met everybody. 5: Friends may come and go, but enemies will certainly become studio heads.

Directed 17 different actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Elizabeth Taylor, Sandy Dennis, Richard Burton, George Segal, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Bancroft, Katharine Ross, Ann-Margret, Meryl Streep,Cher, Melanie Griffith, Sigourney Weaver, Joan Cusack, Kathy Bates, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. (Taylor and Dennis won Oscars for their performances in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966).).

A movie is like a person. Either you trust it or you don't.

It's not a film-maker's job to explain his technique, but to tell his story the best way he can.

I've never understood that aspect of DVDs, where you suddenly put back the things you took out that could go. Why ruin your movie? With material that you've taken out? I never get that. I don't have that impulse... To put them back seems very unpleasant to me. And pointless. It's like when you've written something, when you cut a paragraph, doesn't it seem dead to you? Doesn't it look like something you'd never want to include, because the point is, it could go? You'll never see anything in my pictures, the stuff that came out, stays out.

If everybody's adorable, you can't go anywhere, you can't have any events.

I love to take actors to a place where they open a vein. That's the job. The key is that I make it safe for them to open the vein.