Stars mourn ‘inspirational, irreplaceable’ Mike Nichols

Mr Nichols started his career as a radio host, moving into comedy as part of a duo with Elaine May, with whom he won the Grammy for best comedy album in 1961.

His breakthrough hit came in 1966 with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which won five Oscars and led its star Richard Burton to admit: “I didn't think I could learn anything about comedy - I'd done all of Shakespeare's. But from him I learned.”

For Mr Nichols’s next film, The Graduate, he chose the little-known Dustin Hoffman to play protagonist Benjamin Braddock. The actor has since said there was “no piece of casting more outrageous,” but it paid off with an Oscar.

As well as going on to direct award-winning films including Working Girl and Closer, he also took his talents to the stage with original productions of Annie, Spamalot and Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple.

Mr Nichols won nine Tony awards across six decades. Meryl Streep, who worked with him on film, television and theatre, said he was “an inspiration and joy to know, a director who cried when he laughed, a friend without whom we can't imagine our world, an indelible, irreplaceable man.”

When Ms Streep presented the director with an American Film Institute Life Achievement Award in 2010, he joked: “I got to see my own memorial and I’m still alive…sort of.”

He added: “Movies - making them, seeing them - is not something that could ever lose its pleasure for me. That puts them on a shortlist of things for me that eternally give me joy.”