Elaine May
Elaine May is an actor, born 1932.
May's first fame came from two people and a bare stage. She moved to Chicago in 1955 and joined the Compass Players; in 1957 she and Mike Nichols left to work as a double act, playing clubs in Greenwich Village and then Broadway. Nichols and May improvised scenes about people failing to say what they meant, and the records sold: An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May took the Grammy for best comedy album in 1962.
As a filmmaker she is one of American cinema's great awkward cases. The comedies she made in the seventies, A New Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid and then Mikey and Nicky, are funny in a way that keeps curdling. Characters get what they wanted and are worse off for it, and the camera stays on them a beat past comfort. She acts in her own work too, and her Henrietta Lowell in A New Leaf, a botanist so oblivious she is effectively weatherproof, is one of the most sustained pieces of physical comedy anyone did that decade.
Ishtar in 1987 ended the directing career. It was a large, expensive comedy that became newsroom shorthand for Hollywood excess, and people have been arguing about whether that was fair ever since. She kept writing and she kept acting: Millie Michaels in California Suite, May in Small Time Crooks, Kay Munsinger in Crisis in Six Scenes. There is also a bit part in The Graduate, uncredited, handing Benjamin a note in a film her old stage partner was directing.
The honours arrived late and in bulk: a BAFTA for adapted screenplay, a Tony, the National Medal of Arts from President Obama in 2013, and an honorary Academy Award in 2022.
Movies (10)
TV (3)
Where to start with Elaine May
Enter through A New Leaf. A ruined socialite courts an heiress for her money, and May directs and plays the heiress as a woman whose obliviousness is a kind of armour. It is very funny and quietly ruthless about class.
Then The Heartbreak Kid, which takes a comic premise and keeps pushing until the laughs get uncomfortable, and Mikey and Nicky, the least commercial and most admired of her films, two men talking through one long night. Neither is warm. Both are better than almost anything being made around them.
Ishtar deserves a fair viewing rather than the reputation, though go in expecting a shaggy comedy rather than a lost classic. For her as a performer, California Suite and Small Time Crooks are the easiest watches, and The Graduate contains a blink-length appearance worth spotting.