Nichols would start out as an actor, but once he gravitated toward directing, it was clear that he possessed almost an unrivaled gift that enabled him to move skillfully between comedies, dramas, and even musicals (as in Spamalot), making him the most successful director of his generation. In all, he would win nine Tonys (including two for producing) and two directing Emmys and garner four Oscar nominations in addition to his one win. (He and May would also win the 1961 Grammy Award for best comedy album.)

Harris, the author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back (and the husband of playwright Tony Kushner, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels in America Nichols directed in an Emmy-winning adaptation), clearly has an empathy and a deep admiration for Nichols, but this is not a sugarcoated biography. The piercing cruelty Nichols could show toward performers, often pushing them to the edge of breakdown during rehearsals, is dealt with frankly. “At times, Nichols’s behavior bordered on the sadistic,” Harris writes, describing how during the filming of The Graduate he could be “tough, caustic, dismissive” of Dustin Hoffman, the young actor he had plucked out of obscurity to star as Benjamin Braddock. But so too is the adoration many of his colleagues felt toward him—particularly the women he trusted, nurtured, and closely collaborated with, among them Meryl Streep (Silkwood, Heartburn, Postcards From the Edge), Emma Thompson, Nora Ephron, Carrie Fisher, and, of course, Elaine May.

The chapters covering Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and The Graduate, two of Nichols’s greatest movies and indeed two of the greatest American movies of all time, are among the most engrossing. (Each chapter could have been turned into a book of its own.) Despite both films having been made six decades ago, with many of the key participants now dead, the narratives have a compelling you-are-there quality, as Harris chronicles the tricky business of directing Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in Woolf and in The Graduate describes a scene where Dustin Hoffman, secretly encouraged by Nichols, unexpectedly puts his hand on Anne Bancroft’s breast while Bancroft “without breaking character for second, glances at his hand, barely curious” and cooly examines a spot on the sweater she has just taken off.