Elaine May (born April 21 1932, Philadelphia) is a two-time Academy Award nominated director, screenwriter and actress. She achieved her greatest fame, in the 1950s, from her improvisational comedy routines in partnership with Mike Nichols.
She married Marvin May in the late 1940s as a teenager and gave birth to a daughter, actress Jeannie Berlin (who is known by her mother's maiden name) in 1949; the couple later divorced. In 1972, she married lyricist Sheldon Harnick, best known for his work in Fiddler On The Roof. However, they divorced a year later.
In 1950, May attended the University of Chicago and Playwrights Theatre in Chicago. In 1953, she became a member of the improvisational theatre group The Compass Players, founded by Paul Sills and David Shepherd, which later became The Second City. She remained a member until 1957.
During her membership, May met Mike Nichols, who was then starring in one of Sills' plays, and began a successful partnership with him. Together they formed a standup comic duo, performing in New York clubs and making several TV appearances.
In 1960, they made their Broadway debut with An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May; the original-cast album won the Grammy Award in 1962 for Best Comedy Performance. Throughout the 1960s, thanks in part to the successful work with Nichols, May wrote, directed, and acted in various forms of theatre. In addition, she wrote and performed for radio and recorded several comedy albums. Her work with Nichols during this time was critical to establishing improvisation as a form of comedy. Their stage act and records featured just the two voices with a solo pianist - played by Marty Rubenstein.
May formed and directed an improvisational company called The Third Ear in New York that included Reni Santoni, Peter Boyle, Renee Taylor, and Louise Lasser. On Tuesday nights the cast would improvise with invited guests, like Mark Gordon who had also been in The Compass.
May also wrote several plays during this period. Her greatest success was the one-act Adaptation. Other stage plays she has written include Not Enough Rope, Mr Gogol And Mr Preen, Hot Line, After the Night and the Music, Power Plays, Taller Than A Dwarf, and Adult Entertainment. She also directed the off-Broadway production of Adaptation/Next.
Nichols and May starred together in a stage version of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? at the Long Wharf Theatre in 1980. Nichols had directed the film version in 1966.
Her second directorial effort was The Heartbreak Kid. This comedy was critically lauded and modestly popular, based on a screenplay by Neil Simon, and starring Charles Grodin, Eddie Albert, and May's own daughter, Jeannie Berlin. May followed up these two comedies with a bleak crime story entitled Mikey and Nicky in 1976.
May’s next directorial effort, Ishtar (1987), was her last. Largely shot on location in Morocco, the production was beset by internal difficulties, and advance publicity was so negative that the picture never got off the ground, becoming one of the biggest cinematic disasters of its day.
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