Mike Nichols (born 6 November 1931) is an American television, stage and film director, writer, and producer. Nichols is one of the 9 people to have won all the major American entertainment awards: an Oscar, Grammy, Emmy and Tony Award.

Nichols was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin, Germany, the son of Brigitte Landauer and Igor Nicholaievitch Peschkowsky, a physician. He and his German-Russian Jewish family moved to the United States to flee the Nazis in 1939 . He became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1944. While attending the University of Chicago in the 1950s, he began work in improvisational comedy with the Compass Players, a precursor to The Second City, and later started the long-running Midnight Special folk music program on radio station WFMT.

Nichols formed a comedy team with Elaine May, with whom he appeared in nightclubs, on radio, released best-selling records, made guest appearances on several television programs and had their own show on Broadway, directed by Arthur Penn. They were accompanied by Chicago pianist Marty Rubenstein, host of the television show Marty's Place. Personal idiosyncrasies and tensions (the latter culminating in the out-of-town closing of A Matter of Position, a play written by May and starring Nichols) eventually drove the duo apart to pursue other projects in 1961. They later reconciled and worked together many times, with May scripting his films The Birdcage and Primary Colors. They appeared together at President Jimmy Carter's inaugural gala and in a 1980 New Haven stage revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? with Swoosie Kurtz and James Naughton.