Elaine May

Elaine Iva May, born April 21, 1932, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, is an American actress, comedian, writer, and director whose career has spanned improvisational theater, film, and Broadway. Born Elaine Iva Berlin to Jack Berlin, a theater director and actor, and Ida Berlin, an actress, she began performing at age three in her father's traveling Yiddish theater company, eventually taking on the recurring role of a generic little boy named Benny. Because the troupe toured extensively, May had attended more than fifty schools by the time she was ten. After her father's death when she was eleven, she and her mother relocated to Los Angeles, where she later enrolled at Hollywood High School before dropping out at fourteen.

At sixteen, May married engineer and toy inventor Marvin May, with whom she had one child, actress and screenwriter Jeannie Berlin, born in 1949. The couple divorced in 1960. May subsequently married lyricist Sheldon Harnick in 1962; they divorced a year later. In 1964, she married her psychoanalyst, David L. Rubinfine, and they remained married until his death in 1982. Director Stanley Donen was her long-time companion from 1999 until his death in 2019.

After learning that the University of Chicago accepted students without high school diplomas, May traveled to Chicago with seven dollars, hitchhiking from California. She began auditing classes at the university in 1950 and, through that environment, encountered Mike Nichols, then an actor in the school's theatrical group. In 1955, she became a founding member of the Compass Players, an improvisational theater group established by Paul Sills and David Shepherd. Nichols later joined the group, and the two developed improvised comedy sketches together. In 1957, they left the Compass Players to form their own stage act, Nichols and May, performing nightly in Greenwich Village clubs alongside Joan Rivers and Woody Allen, as well as on Broadway. The duo made regular appearances on television and radio and released multiple comedy albums, receiving four Grammy Award nominations and winning Best Comedy Album for An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May in 1962. Their collaboration was later documented in the PBS film Nichols and May: Take Two in 1996.

May directed her first feature film, the black screwball comedy A New Leaf, in 1971, becoming the first female director with a Hollywood deal since Ida Lupino. She went on to direct The Heartbreak Kid in 1972, the gangster film Mikey and Nicky in 1976, and the adventure comedy Ishtar in 1987. She also acted in films including Luv and Enter Laughing, both released in 1967, California Suite in 1978, and Small Time Crooks in 2000. As a screenwriter, May earned Academy Award nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay for her work on Warren Beatty's Heaven Can Wait in 1978 and Mike Nichols' Primary Colors in 1998, the latter of which also won her the BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. She also wrote the screenplay for Nichols' The Birdcage in 1996. In 2013, President Barack Obama honored her with the National Medal of Arts.

May returned to acting on Broadway in the 2018 revival of Kenneth Lonergan's The Waverly Gallery, a production that earned her the Tony Award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role in a Play in 2019, as well as the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Actress in a Play that same year. The win made her the second-oldest performer behind Lois Smith to receive a Tony Award for acting. Her Broadway credits also include An Evening With Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Taller Than a Dwarf, After the Night and the Music, and George is Dead, and she has worked on Broadway both as a performer and as a book writer, with credits spanning from 1903 to 2018. In 2016, she appeared in Woody Allen's Amazon Prime series Crisis in Six Scenes. In 2022, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences presented her with an Honorary Academy Award, citing her bold and uncompromising approach to filmmaking as a writer, director, and actress.