Mike Nichols: The Refugee Who Made Isolation a Superpower

April 1939: a seven-year-old boy walks up the gangplank of a transatlantic ship fleeing Nazi Germany. He speaks no English and, after a botched vaccine reaction, has no hair and no eyebrows. Stripped of everything most of us use to blend in, he learned to study humanity from the outside.This episode traces how Igor Mikhail Peschkowsky became Mike Nichols, the EGOT-winning director. It's about the conscious construction of the self, how a man handed profound isolation engineered it into an unparalleled eye for human behavior.The tragic irony of his father's death from unshielded X-ray work, leaving Nichols adrift at a young ageHis electric first meeting with Elaine May and how Nichols and May dismantled vaudeville comedyCasting unknown Dustin Hoffman over Robert Redford for The Graduate, and renaming "Mrs. Roosevelt" to "Mrs. Robinson"Directing the volatile Burton and Taylor in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which earned 13 Oscar nominationsThe personal cost behind the triumphs: a Halcion-triggered psychotic episode and the question of whether genius requires trauma