Mike Nichols films: his top 5 hits – and an expensive flop

Mike Nichols, the critically acclaimed director of films including The Graduate and Catch-22, has died at the age of 83.

Born in Germany, Nichols was one of only a handful of stars to win all four major US entertainment awards – an Oscar, a Grammy, an Emmy and a Tony, the BBC reports.

"No one was more passionate about his craft than Mike," said ABC News president James Goldston, who added that Nichols had been "a true visionary".

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Below are five of his greatest films (and his most expensive flop).

The Graduate (1967)

Many regard The Graduate as one of the greatest films ever made. The coming-of-age tale launched the career of Dustin Hoffman, a method actor who arrived at acting relatively late but went on to become a huge Hollywood star. The film's bittersweet ending has been discussed and analysed by cinema fans and critics for decades.

Catch-22 (1970)

Joseph Heller's scathing war satire was always going to be a difficult book to turn into a movie – not least because so much of the narrative takes place in the central character Yossarian's head – but most critics agreed that Mike Nichols did it justice. In his review for the New York Times, Vincent Canby wrote "It's the special achievement of Heller's novel, as well as of Mike Nichols's screen version, that Yossarian's panic emerges as something so important, so reasonable, so moving, and so funny.

Silkwood (1983)

Nichols received an Oscar nomination for best director for Silkwood (in total he received four throughout his career). Meryl Streep starred in the film, which was based on a true story. Roger Ebert praised her performance as being "so convincing that we become witnesses instead of moviegoers".

Working Girl (1988)

Throughout his career, Nichols became known for getting great performances out of his actors and actresses. Working Girl is often regarded as a career high for Melanie Griffith, whose "scrappy, sexy, unpredictable" performance as a woman who rises from rise from Staten Island secretary to Wall Street wolf helped to propel the popular picture.

Angels in America (2003)

As well as directing films, Nichols also had a career as a theatre director, so he was a "natural pick" for an HBO miniseries version Tony Kushner's Pulitzer- and Tony-winning play, The Wall Street Journal says. The production won Nichols his second Emmy for directing a television movie or miniseries.

The Day of the Dolphin (1973)

Not everything Nichols touched turned to gold. In 1973, The Day of the Dolphin was billed as "the most amazing outdoor adventure ever made" – and graced with the tagline: "Unwittingly, he trained a dolphin to kill the President of the United States". The costly ecological conspiracy thriller's poster trumpeted the fact that it had been two years in the making – a fact most savvy moviegoers know was more likely to be a sign of impending disaster rather than success. Roger Ebert concluded that the film "trips on its own stylishness and tries so hard not to be a conventional science-fiction thriller that it fails, alas, to be anything".