MUONGOZA SINEMA HOLLYWOOD MIKE NICHOLS AFARIKI

Hollywood director Mike Nichols, who won an Oscar for The Graduate, has died aged 83. Nichols died on Wednesday evening. His death was announced in a statement by ABC News President James Goldston. During a career that spanned almost six decades, Nichols directed classics such as The Odd Couple, Working Girl and Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? He also worked in TV and theatre and was one of a few people to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony.

"He was a true visionary,” Mr Goldston said in the statement. "No one was more passionate about his craft than Mike." Nichols was a versatile talent with a remarkable gift for mixing humour and drama. 

He said he liked stories about the real lives of real people and that humour inevitably pervades even the bleakest of such tales. "I have never understood people dividing things into dramas and comedies," Nichols once said. "There are more laughs in 'Hamlet' than many Broadway comedies." In Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? - his directorial debut in 1966 - he captured the vicious yet sparkling dialogue of Edward Albee's play as a couple played by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor torment each other. 

A year later, The Graduate - the story of an earnest young man rebelling against his elders' expectations - shot Dustin Hoffman to fame and went on to become a symbol of an era and a classic of American cinema. Nichols said decades later that he was "just trying to make a nice little movie" and that "it wasn't until when I saw it all put together that I realised this was something remarkable". 

Nichols, who was married to ABC's Diane Sawyer, was a nine-time Tony Award winner on Broadway. His work in television included Angels In America, an award-winning HBO miniseries about AIDS. Nichols often collaborated with Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson. Born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin, Nichols fled Nazi Germany for America at age seven with his family. 

He attended the University of Chicago but left to study acting in New York, and began his career in a ground-breaking comedy duo with Elaine May. Divorced three times, Nichols married Sawyer in 1988. Recent works include Closer, starring Jude Law and Julia Roberts, and Charlie Wilson's War, featuring Roberts, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Tom Hanks.