Mike Nichols really doesn't direct movies that often, so maybe it's not so surprising that whenever he does unwrap a new film, such as Charlie Wilson's War, the critical response tends to run from polite to rapturous, the occasion treated in the media as a serious cultural event. (Even Regarding Henry inspired thoughtful meditative pieces exploring the question: what heavy object might have fallen on Mike's head?) But for some of us, the real puzzler is, why doesn't Nichols act more? He made his name doing revue sketches with his old partner Elaine May. Elaine May doesn't act much, either, but she seems to be a far less social creature to begin with, and between her appearances in Enter Laughing and Luv in the 1960s and her most recent on-screen role, in Woody Allen's Small Time Crooks in 2000, she has done enough — turning up with some kind of almost-every-ten-years regularity — to keep the movie world aware that she has a corporeal form. Nichols, on the other hand, has in the course of his career taken exactly one on-screen acting role in a feature film. It was a doozy, though — the title role, which is one-third of the cast, of David Hare's 1997 film version of Wallace Shawn's play The Designated Mourner.
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