A truly lovely actor, she was smart, sensitive and had great ideas.

After several false starts, it ended up in the hands of someone I was thrilled by. There was a star comedian pitching hard for it as her first dramatic vehicle and a child actor pitching it as her adult crossover. Given that it was about how a dying psychiatrist changed my life after my hospitalisation for bipolar, it consisted mainly of two characters talking in rooms, so I was bewildered when the budget came in at $25m. So I just kept moving the pictures around: Jarvis Cocker beside Peter Cook seemed reasonable, Lauren Bacall to De La Soul stimulating.Įventually I became one – a writer – and was hired to adapt my memoir into a movie.

I knew I wanted to be a writer, but I couldn’t yet put the words in the right order to get what was in myhead on to the page. I had started to watch Mike Nichols’ movies with my mum: the The Graduate, Working Girl and Postcards from the Edge were moments of true pleasure. Sometimes my dad, grumbling about the stains revealed on my walls whenever the posters were rearranged, would walk in and bellow “Blu Tack must die”, then walk out again. I loved Britpop, and placed Blur beside Steve Martin, so it looked as though he had gone prematurely grey from the stress of working as their security detail. I thought carefully about where to place Mel Brooks and Carl Reiner, Billy Crystal, Peter Cook and the early 1960s comedy duo of Mike Nichols and Elaine May (photographed before they split and each became acclaimed directors).

W hen I was a teen, I Blu Tacked pictures of my icons to my bedroom wall, setting places for a dinner party I was 10 years too young to have and two decades late for.

A Walk Out of the World by Ruth Nichols