Elaine May was born Elaine Iva Berlin in Philadelphia in 1932, the daughter of Jewish parents, theater director/actor Jack Berlin and Ida Berlin, an actress. As a child, Elaine performed with her father in his traveling Yiddish theater company, which he took around the country. Her stage debut on the road was at the age of three, and she eventually played the character of a generic little boy named Benny.
Because the troupe toured extensively, May had been in over 50 different schools by the time she was ten, having spent as little as a few weeks enrolled at any one time. She says she hated school and would spend her free time at home reading fairy tales and mythology. Her father died when she was 11, after which time she and her mother moved to Los Angeles. She later enrolled in Hollywood High School.
May dropped out of high school when she was fourteen. Two years later, when she was sixteen, she married Marvin May, an engineer and toy inventor. They had one child, Jeannie Berlin, who became an actress and screenwriter. They divorced years later, and she married lyricist Sheldon Harnick in 1962, who is best known for his work in Fiddler On The Roof. Their marriage was short-lived, however, and they divorced a year later. She next married her psychoanalyst, Dr. David L. Rubinfine, and they remained married until his death in 1982. Her current partner is American film director and choreographer Stanley Donen.
Stage career
After her divorce from Marvin May, she studied acting with former Moscow Art Theatre coach, Maria Ouspenskaya. She also held odd jobs during that period and tried to enroll in college. She learned, however, that colleges in California require a high school diploma to apply, which she didn't have. After finding out that the University of Chicago was one of the few colleges that would accept students without diplomas, she set out with $7 to her name and hitchhiked to Chicago.
Soon after moving to Chicago in 1950, May began informally taking classes at the university by sitting in without enrolling. She nevertheless sometimes engaged in discussions with instructors.Mike Nichols, who was then an actor in the school’s theatrical group, remembers her coming to his philosophy class, saying "something outrageous," and leaving.
They learned of each other from friends, eventually being introduced after one of his stage shows. Six weeks later, they bumped into each other at a train station in Chicago. "We had instant rapport,” remembers Nichols. They began spending time together over the following weeks as “dead broke theatre junkies.”
Playwriting
Following the break-up, May wrote several plays. Her greatest success was the one-act Adaptation. Other stage plays she has written include Not Enough Rope, Mr Gogol And Mr Preen, Hotline(which was performed off-Broadway in 1995 as part of the anthology play, Death Defying Acts), After the Night and the Music, Power Plays, Taller Than A Dwarf, and Adult Entertainment. She also directed the off-Broadway production of Adaptation/Next. Most recently, she wrote the one-act play, George is Dead, which starred Marlo Thomas, and was performed on Broadway from 2011 to 2012 as part of the anthology play, Relatively Speaking, directed by John Turturro.
Film career
May made her film writing and directing debut in 1971 with A New Leaf, a screwball comedy based on Jack Ritchie's The Green Heart. (Ritchie would later retitle the story after A New Leaf.) The film starred Walter Matthau and May in the lead roles. Originally, May handed in a 180-minute black comedy that the studio cut into a 102-minute weird romance.
Her second directorial effort was The Heartbreak Kid. This comedy was critically lauded and modestly popular, based on a screenplay by Neil Simon, and starring Charles Grodin, Eddie Albert, Cybill Shepherd and May's own daughter, Jeannie Berlin. Albert and Berlin each received Supporting Actor/Actress Oscar nominations for the film.
May followed up these two comedies with the bleak crime drama entitled Mikey and Nicky. Budgeted at $1.8 million and scheduled for a summer 1975 release, the film ended up costing $4.3 million and not coming out until December 1976. She was eventually fired by Paramount Pictures (the studio that financed the film), but succeeded in getting herself rehired by hiding two reels of the negative until the studio gave in.
The film's subsequent failure at the box office damaged her career in Hollywood until Warren Beatty decided to give her one more chance. Their collaboration, Ishtar (1987), co-starring Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, was an even more notorious disaster than her previous film. Largely shot on location in Morocco, the production was beset by creative differences among the principals and enormous cost overruns. The advance publicity was largely negative, and despite some positive reviews from The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, the film was one of the biggest cinematic disasters of all time. Since that time, May has not directed another film.
Writing
Elaine May received an Oscar nomination for updating Here Comes Mr. Jordan as Heaven Can Wait. May reunited with her former comic partner, Mike Nichols, for The Birdcage in 1996. The film relocated the classic French farce, La Cage aux Folles, from France to South Beach, Miami. May received her second Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay when she again worked with Nichols on Primary Colors in 1997. She was one of several writers, none of whom were given credit for contributing to the screenplay, for the 1982 megahit Tootsie, notably the scenes involving the character played by Bill Murray.
Source: Wikipedia