1. Elaine May first gained fame in the 1950s for her improvisational comedy routines with Mike Nichols before transitioning her career, regularly breaking the mold as a writer and director of several critically acclaimed films.
27 Facts About Elaine May
1. 2.
Elaine May was honored with the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama in 2013, and an Honorary Academy Award in 2022.
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In 1955, May moved to Chicago and became a founding member of the Compass Players, an improvisational theater group.
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Elaine May began working alongside Nichols and in 1957, they both quit the group to form their own stage act, Nichols and May In New York, they performed nightly in clubs in Greenwich Village alongside Joan Rivers and Woody Allen, as well as on the Broadway stage.
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Elaine May became the first female director with a Hollywood deal since Ida Lupino when she directed the 1971 black screwball comedy A New Leaf.
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Elaine May Iva Berlin was born on April 21,1932, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Jewish parents, theater director and actor Jack Berlin and actress Ida Berlin.
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In 1964, May married her psychoanalyst, David L Rubinfine; they remained married until his death in 1982.
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In 1955, Elaine May joined a new, off-campus improvisational theater group in Chicago, The Compass Players, becoming one of its charter members.
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Nichols was personally asked to leave the Compass Players in 1957 because he and Elaine May became too good, which threw the company off balance, noted club manager Jay Landsman.
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Nichols then left the group in 1957, with Elaine May quitting with him.
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Elaine May made her film writing and directing debut in 1971 with A New Leaf, a black comedy based on a short story which she read in an Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine called The Green Heart which the author Jack Ritchie would later retitle A New Leaf.
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Elaine May quickly followed her debut film with 1972's The Heartbreak Kid.
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Elaine May worked with Julian Schlossberg to get the rights to the film and released a director's cut in 1980.
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In 2019, Elaine May worked with The Criterion Collection to create the newest director's cut.
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Elaine May contributed to the screenplay for the 1982 megahit Tootsie, notably the scenes involving the character played by Bill Murray.
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Elaine May reunited with her former comic partner, Mike Nichols, for the 1996 film The Birdcage, an American adaptation of the classic French farce La Cage aux Folles.
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Elaine May received her second Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay when she again worked with Nichols on the 1998 film Primary Colors.
18.
Elaine May wrote the one-act play George Is Dead, which starred Marlo Thomas and was performed on Broadway from late 2011 into 2012 as part of the anthology play Relatively Speaking along with two other plays by Woody Allen and Joel Coen, directed by John Turturro.
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That same year, she returned to acting, her first role since 2000, starring alongside her friend Woody Allen in his series Crisis in Six Scenes on Amazon Prime, Tim Goodman of The Hollywood Reporter praised their chemistry together writing, "The best episodes are the last two, when Crisis in Six Scenes becomes a full-blown farce and we get to see Allen and Elaine May playing accidental aging radicals, shuffling around Brooklyn".
20.
In 2018, aged 86, Elaine May returned to Broadway after 60 years in a Lila Neugebauer-directed revival of Kenneth Lonergan's play The Waverly Gallery opposite Lucas Hedges, Joan Allen, and Michael Cera.
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In 2019, it was announced that Elaine May is set to direct her first narrative feature in over thirty years.
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In 2024, Johnson stated that the film is still in development and she serves as the film's producer and star with Elaine May still set to direct.
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May's life and career are detailed in Miss May Does Not Exist: The Life and Work of Elaine May, Hollywood's Hidden Genius written by Carrie Courogen, which was released in June 2024 by St Martin's Press, and was nominated for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle's best first book prize.
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On stage, Elaine May won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Play for her performance as Gladys in the Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan's The Waverly Gallery in 2019.
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Elaine May was awarded the National Medal of Arts for her lifetime contributions to American comedy by President Barack Obama, in a ceremony in the White House on July 10,2013.
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In January 2016, the Writers Guild of America-West announced that Elaine May would receive its 2016 Laurel Award for Screenwriting Achievement at the Writers Guild of America Award ceremony in Los Angeles on February 13.
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Elaine May was honored at the annual Governors Awards alongside Samuel L Jackson, Liv Ullmann, and Danny Glover on March 25,2022.