Mike Nichols, the German-born renaissance man of American entertainment, has died at the age of 83. Nichols won the best director Oscar for his 1967 classic The Graduate, although his cabinet also contained a Golden Globe, a Grammy, four Emmys and nine Tony awards. His career embraced comedy and drama and straddled film, TV and theatre. The immigrant auteur seemed at home in every discipline.

Born Mikhail Igor Peschowski into an artistic family in Berlin, Nichols fled to the US in 1939. He first worked in an improv troupe and found early fame as as part of comedy duo with Elaine May, peppering the audience with such quick-fire repartee that the pair became known as “the world’s fastest humans”.

Nichols made his film directing debut with 1966’s scabrous Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor as a warring married couple. He then went on to further acclaim with The Graduate, a film that perfectly caught the uneasy, questioning mood of late-60s America. The Graduate famously opened to the strains of Simon and Garfunkel’s The Sound of Silence and bowed out with Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross’s bus-ride into the unknown - a final shot which remains one of cinema’s greatest hanging endings.

His other notable films include Carnal Knowledge, Silkwood, The Birdcage, Heartburn and Working Girl. Nichols made his directing swansong with the 2007 political farce Charlie Wilson’s War, starring Tom Hanks as a rogue congressman embroiled in the 1980s Afghan war.

He is survived by three children and his fourth wife, ABC news anchor Diane Sawyer.

“A movie is like a person,” the director once remarked. “Either you trust it or you don’t.” Over a 50-year career, Nichols specialised in films that we could trust.

• Peter Bradshaw on Mike Nichols