The son of German Jews who fled Hitler, director

Mike ( The Graduate') Nichols confronts his own dark side in his new werewolf movie.

"You could make a case that the world has already end-

ed," observes Jack Nicholson, in the role of a genteel New York book editor in "Wolf," Mike Nichols's latest film. "Certainly that art is dead, that the death of the six million Jews marked the end of art. That no metaphor, nothing of the imagination could ever compete with that."

That may sound like an unlikely line of dialogue coming from what is basically a horror film: Due out from Columbia next spring, "Wolf" stars Nicholson as a bookish and browbeaten intellectual, who, after being bitten by a wolf he has hit with his car, turns into a Gotham werewolf. Equally improbable is the fact that Nichols is director; it is, after all, the first fright film from the man best- known in the past three decades as the master of urbane sophisticated comedy in both Hollywood ("Postcards From the Edge," "Working Girl") and on Broadway ("Plaza Suite," "The Real Thing").

Yet the 61-year-old, German-born Nichols, talking by phone from the New York editing room where he is working on "Wolf," insists that "the Holocaust was the central fact of my life, and I have always had a sense of living on borrowed time. It's something you never think about, but it's always there.

"It's the plight of the alien who's learned perfectly how to imitate the natives. I think the sense of being from somewhere else, of being a Jew in another culture, is the main thing about my work."

Nichols has certainly learned how to "imitate the natives." Newspaper and magazine articles frequently portray the slender, fair-haired director as a tweedy country squire, owner of a 60-acre Connecticut ranch where he raises Arabian horses. The identity of his wife, an even more famous celebrity, doesn't hurt the image either: He is married to the WASP-y TV newswoman Diane Sawyer. "His posture is sedate," wrote The New York Times critic David Richards in a recent profile of Nichols; he wears an "immaculately tailored wardrobe… and he speaks in the carefully measured rhythms of an investment banker."

Nichols was born Michael Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin in 1931. His maternal grandfather was Jewish-German socialist leader and philosopher Gustav Landauer, a close associate of Martin Buber. Landauer was one of the earliest victims of German fascism; in 1919 he was murdered in a Munich street by troops of the reactionary military forces that crushed the fledgling Bavarian socialist state in which he was serving as a minister.

Nichols's father was a German-Russian physician, who in 1939 was able to bring his family to the United States after the signing of the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact enabled Russian passport-holders to flee the Nazis. Settling in New York, his father took a new name by shortening his Russian patronymic, Nicholaievich.

With his father passing away when he was only 12, Nichols managed to attend the University of Chicago via scholarships and a succession of menial jobs. After studying acting in New York with Lee Strasberg, he returned to Chicago, where he hooked up with other young Jewish performers like Elaine May, Alan Arkin and Shelly Berman, to found the Second City comedy group.

Nichols first won fame in the late 50s by pairing off with Elaine May as a comedy duet in nightclubs and on Broadway. Often portraying couples in conflict, they specialized in parodying everyday anxieties and neuroses; one of their most famous skits had May as an overprotective Jewish mom badgering her son Nichols, the world's first Jewish astronaut.

After dissolving their act in the early 60s, Nichols turned to directing, making his mark with the original Broadway productions of the Neil Simon comedies "Barefoot in the Park" and "The Odd Couple." In 1966, he struck cinematic pay dirt, with his first behind-the-camera assignment, the critical and commercial blockbuster "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

A year later came what is still seen as the high point of his career: "The Graduate," which has become perhaps the seminal film of the 60s generation.

It encapsulates all of Nichols's strengths as a director: superb taste in casting (it was his idea to cast an unknown Jewish nebbish named Dustin Hoffman in the lead), a talent for getting the most out of his actors, a sensibility attuned for sophisticated comedy, and the ability to suppress his own ego to work with equally gifted collaborators, especially important as Nichols is primarily an interpreter of other people's material.

"Wolf" reunites him with two long-time collaborators: May, who did rewrites on the original screenplay by novelist Jim Harrison, and Nicholson, who gave memorable performances un

Nichols: The sense of being a Jew, of being an alien in another culture, is the main thing about my work'

der Nichols's direction in "Carnal Knowledge," "The Fortune" and "Heartburn."

"Jack and I were simultaneously drawn to the story and afraid of it," Nichols says of his early involvement. "We kept circling the script and the idea. As we began putting our ideas into it, Elaine began to create a script into which our own subterranean feelings about the gently apocalyptic universe in which we live were sort of ingested."

The screenplay depicts a werewolf light years removed from the standard, Lon Chaney variety. At first, the character played by Nicholson even finds his new-found lycanthropy pleasant. He experiences enhanced sensory powers and becomes more aggressive, more effective, more empowered by his wolfish proclivities. He even gets a glamorous artist, played by Michelle Pfeiffer, to fall for him. Eventually, however, his transformation gets out of hand.

" Wolf,'" says Nichols, "works as a kind of fantasy metaphor for the ways in which the world is actually changing. It is about the viruses and the strangenesses at loose in the world, and at the same time it's very much of the moment - it's happening right this minute, in a very urban place. It doesn't observe many of the werewolf conventions, such as (Nicholson) changing into a monster at night and disemboweling nurses. It's more about the actual end of the world as it's occurring to all of us. It's about people changing under the pressure of the end of the world."

Although Nichols has successfully tackled serious and intense sub-ject matter on both stage and screen - including the real-life nuclear thriller "Silkwood" and Ariel Dorfman's play about political torture, "Death and the Maiden" - the director is aware that he is taking a chance with "Wolf." Is the public ready to accept a truly adult horror movie?

"I know it's at your own peril that you work against genre modes," he says. "I just kept asking the question, how would this really happen? If this were going to happen, how would it happen physically, how would it affect people?"

But however conscientious "Wolf" may be in its efforts to enable viewers to suspend their disbelief, Nichols acknowledged that the numbing effect of the Holocaust, as described by Nicholson's own character, seems to bear harshly on his own central metaphor. In a world that held the death camps, he says, it takes a lot to keep the were-

wolf myth from becoming howlingly ludicrous.