More than 40 years later, in 2008, he directed a revival of Clifford Odets’s backstage drama, “The Country Girl,” with Morgan Freeman and Frances McDormand, and left his penultimate mark on Broadway with his acclaimed “Death of a Salesman.” Fittingly, attention was paid. (In 2013, he directed Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal,” a backward-in-time-traveling drama about an adulterous affair, starring Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz.)

Mr. Nichols, who lived in Manhattan and Martha’s Vineyard, married Ms. Sawyer, his fourth wife, in April 1988. His first three marriages ended in divorce. He and his first wife, Patricia Scott, a singer who sometimes opened for Nichols and May, had no children.

In addition to Ms. Sawyer, he is survived by a daughter, Daisy, from his second marriage, to Margot Callas (who had been a muse to the poet Robert Graves and a lover of the writer Alastair Reid and who was sometimes described as an Elaine May look-alike); and another daughter, Jenny, and a son, Max, from his third marriage, to Annabel Davis-Goff, a novelist.

He is also survived by a brother, Bob Nichols, and four grandchildren.

Through Icarus Productions, Mr. Nichols was also an active producer away from the stage. He produced the highly regarded television series “Family” and a number of movies, including many that he directed, as well as “The Designated Mourner,” an adaptation of Wallace Shawn’s chilling, futuristic play about the disintegration of a marriage set in an unnamed, repressive, youth-dominated country. Mr. Nichols acted in the film — as he did in the play’s 1996 premiere in London — in the title role of a man whose ideals have yielded to an embrace of conformity.

At his death, Mr. Nichols had at least one project on his plate, as the director and executive producer of “Master Class,” an adaptation for HBO of Terrence McNally’s play of the same title about Maria Callas, starring Ms. Streep.

In 1999, Mr. Nichols was honored at Lincoln Center for a lifetime of achievement, and Ms. May, his onetime foil and, after a hiatus, his longtime friend, addressed the crowd and offered an encomium with just enough bite to make it ring true.

“So he’s witty, he’s brilliant, he’s articulate, he’s on time, he’s prepared, and he writes,” she said. “But is he perfect? He knows you can’t really be liked or loved if you’re perfect. You have to have just enough flaws. And he does. Just the right, perfect flaws to be absolutely endearing.”