1950–1957: Stage career and Compass Players After her marriage to Marvin May, she studied acting. She also held odd jobs during that period, such as a roof salesman, and tried to enroll in college. She learned, however, that colleges in California required a high school diploma to apply, which she did not have. appearances and radio broadcasts.
Technique Among the qualities of their act, which according to one writer made them a rarity, was that they used both "snob and mob appeal", which gave them a wide audience. Nachman explains that they presented a new kind of comedy team, unlike previous comedy duos which had an intelligent member alongside a much less intelligent one, as with
Laurel and Hardy,
Fibber McGee and Molly,
Burns and Allen,
Abbott and Costello, and
Martin and Lewis. According to May, it was simple: "It's nothing more than quickly creating a situation between two people and throwing up some kind of problem for one of them." May helped remove the stereotype of women's roles on stage. Producer
David Shepherd notes that she accomplished that partly by not choosing traditional 1950s female roles for her characters, which were often housewives or women working at menial jobs. Instead, she often played the character of a sophisticated woman, such as a doctor, a psychiatrist, or an employer. Following the break-up, May wrote several plays. Her greatest success was the one-act
Adaptation (1969). 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,
The Way of All Fish, and
Adult Entertainment. In 1969, she directed the off-Broadway production of
Adaptation/Next.
1970–1999: Career as a writer and director May made her film writing and directing debut in 1971 with
A New Leaf, a black comedy based on a short story which she read in an
Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine called "The Green Heart" which the author
Jack Ritchie would later retitle "A New Leaf". The unconventional "romance" with
Walter Matthau as a Manhattan bachelor faced with bankruptcy, also starred May herself as the awkward botanist-heiress, Henrietta Lowell, whom Matthau cynically woos and marries to salvage an extravagant lifestyle. Director May originally submitted a 180-minute work to
Paramount, but the studio cut it back by nearly 80 minutes for release. Dissatisfied with the cuts, she fought studio exec
Robert Evans to have her name removed, but was unsuccessful. The film has since become a cult classic.
Vincent Canby cited the two-reelers of the 1930s and Depression-era screwball comedies when he called it "a beautifully and gently cockeyed movie that recalls at least two different traditions of American film comedy... The entire project is touched by a fine and knowing madness." May received a
Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of Henrietta. '' lead actors
John Cassavetes (left) and
Peter Falk (right) in 1971 May quickly followed her debut film with 1972's
The Heartbreak Kid. She limited her role to directing, using a screenplay by
Neil Simon, based on a story by Bruce Jay Friedman. The film starred
Charles Grodin,
Cybill Shepherd,
Eddie Albert, and May's own daughter,
Jeannie Berlin. It was a major critical success, and holds a 90% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. In 2000, it was listed at No. 91 on
AFI's
100 Years... 100 Laughs list. May followed the two comedies by writing and directing the gangster film
Mikey and Nicky, starring
Peter Falk and
John Cassavetes. Budgeted at $1.8 million and scheduled for a summer 1975 release, the film cost $4.3 million and was not released until December 1976. May ended up in a legal battle with Paramount Pictures over post-production costs, at one point hiding reels of the film in her husband's friend's Connecticut garage and later suing the company for $8 million for breach of contract. May worked with
Julian Schlossberg to get the rights to the film and released a director's cut in 1980. In 2019, May worked with
The Criterion Collection to create the newest director's cut. The film has gained appreciation by many critics and audiences in recent years. In
Herbert Ross's
California Suite (1978), written by
Neil Simon, she was reunited with
A New Leaf co-star Walter Matthau, playing his wife Millie. In addition to writing three of the films she directed, May received an Oscar nomination for updating the 1941 film
Here Comes Mr. Jordan as
Heaven Can Wait (1978). May reunited with Nichols for a stage production of ''
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in New Haven in 1980. She contributed (uncredited) to the screenplay for the 1982 megahit Tootsie'', notably the scenes involving the character played by
Bill Murray.
Warren Beatty worked with May on the comedy
Ishtar (1987), starring Beatty and
Dustin Hoffman. Largely shot on location in
Morocco, the production was beset by creative differences among the principals and had cost overruns. Long before the picture was ready for release, the troubled production had become the subject of numerous press stories, including a long cover article in
New York magazine. Some of the opposition to the film came from
David Puttnam, the studio head, making
Ishtar a prime example of studio suicide. The advance publicity was largely negative and, despite some positive reviews from the
Los Angeles Times and
The Washington Post, the film was a box office disaster. The film
Ishtar has been positively re-evaluated in the 21st century by multiple publications including the
Los Angeles Times,
Slate,
Indiewire, and
The Dissolve. Richard Brody of
The New Yorker called
Ishtar a "wrongly maligned masterwork" and raved, "There's a level of invention, a depth of reflection, and a tangle of emotions in
Ishtar which are reached by few films and few filmmakers." May acted in the film
In the Spirit (1990), in which she played a "shopaholic stripped of consumer power"; Robert Pardi has described her portrayal as a "study of fraying equanimity [that] is a classic comic tour de force." She also contributed to the screenplay for the drama
Dangerous Minds (1995). May reunited with her former comic partner,
Mike Nichols, for the 1996 film
The Birdcage, an American adaptation of the classic French farce
La Cage aux Folles. Their film relocated the story from France to
South Beach, Miami. It was a major box office hit. May received her second Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay when she again worked with Nichols on the 1998 film
Primary Colors.
2000–present: Return to acting and Broadway She appeared in
Woody Allen's
Small Time Crooks (2000) where she played the character May Sloane, which Allen named after May when he wrote it, and with May being his first choice for the part. Allen spoke of her as a genius, and of his ease of working with her: "She shows up on time, she knows her lines, she can ad-lib creatively, and is willing to. If you don't want her to, she won't. She's a dream. She puts herself in your hands. She's a genius, and I don't use that word casually." Nearly 15 years later, Allen ended up casting her to play his wife, Kay Munsinger, in his
Amazon limited series,
Crisis in Six Scenes, which was released in 2016. In 2002,
Stanley Donen directed her musical play
Adult Entertainment with
Jeannie Berlin and
Danny Aiello at Variety Arts Theater in
Manhattan. May wrote the one-act play
George Is Dead, which starred
Marlo Thomas and was performed on Broadway from late 2011 into 2012 as part of the anthology play
Relatively Speaking along with two other plays by
Woody Allen and
Joel Coen, directed by
John Turturro.
Charles Isherwood of
The New York Times praised May's entry describing it as "a delicious study in the bliss of narcissism". David Rooney of
The Hollywood Reporter concurred describing
George is Dead as the "strongest entry". Before he died in 2019, Donen was reported to be in pre-production for a new film, begun December 2013, to be co-written with May and produced by Nichols. A
table reading of the script for potential investors included such actors as
Christopher Walken,
Charles Grodin,
Ron Rifkin, and Jeannie Berlin. When May's lifelong collaborator Nichols died in 2014, May stepped up to poignantly direct the 2016 TV documentary
Mike Nichols: American Masters. That same year, she returned to acting, her first role since 2000, starring alongside her friend
Woody Allen in his series
Crisis in Six Scenes on
Amazon Prime, Tim Goodman of
The Hollywood Reporter praised their chemistry together writing, "The best episodes are the last two, when
Crisis in Six Scenes becomes a full-blown farce and we get to see Allen and May playing accidental aging radicals, shuffling around Brooklyn". In 2018, aged 86, May returned to Broadway after 60 years in a
Lila Neugebauer-directed revival of
Kenneth Lonergan's play
The Waverly Gallery opposite
Lucas Hedges,
Joan Allen, and
Michael Cera. The play ran at the
John Golden Theatre, the same theatre where Nichols and May had started out almost 60 years earlier. In 2024, Johnson stated that the film is still in development and she serves as the film's producer and star with May still set to direct. Later that year,
Sebastian Stan was also attached to co-star, and said the primary impediment to production at that point was the film's insurers seeking a backup director, due to May's age, who could shadow the production and complete it if May was unable to. ==Influence and legacy==