--- title: "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" year: 1966 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/whos-afraid-of-virginia-woolf" fi1m_score: 86 critics_score: 84 critics_reviews: 7 published: "2026-09-20T04:40:23.415941+00:00" updated: "2026-09-20T04:40:23.945621+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) Directed by Mike Nichols · 2h 11m · MPA NR · Drama **Fi1m score: 86** · Critics 84 from 7 reviews *In a sentence:* Two in the morning, four drinks in, and nobody has thought to leave > Mike Nichols’s first film keeps Edward Albee’s play almost whole and points Haskell Wexler’s camera at four faces for 131 minutes. It is exhausting on purpose, Elizabeth Taylor is remarkable, and it is still worth your evening, provided you have nowhere else to be. ## Synopsis It is two in the morning in a New England college town. George (Richard Burton), an associate professor of history, and his wife Martha (Elizabeth Taylor), the daughter of the college president, walk home from a faculty party, already drunk and already at each other. Martha announces she has invited guests: Nick (George Segal), a new young biology lecturer, and his wife Honey (Sandy Dennis). They arrive, take drinks, and are drawn into a night of what Martha calls fun and games. George is needled about his stalled career, Martha about her age and her drinking, and a son is mentioned whom George would rather were not. Nick and Honey keep trying to leave and keep accepting another drink. ## Review *Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?* is a filmed play, and it does not pretend otherwise. Ernest Lehman’s screenplay keeps most of Edward Albee’s dialogue, the action stays in one house for the greater part of two hours, and the only real change of scene is a drive to a roadhouse in the small hours. Mike Nichols, directing his first film, has decided the words are the point and the faces are the pictures. That is the right decision, and it costs something, which we will come to. The house is where it starts working. Richard Sylbert has built a faculty home that nobody has tidied in years: books stacked on the floor, a drinks table that gets more use than the kitchen, lampshades slightly askew. Haskell Wexler shoots it in black and white with the light coming from those lamps, so that faces are lit from below and the corners of rooms go dark. When George and Martha argue, the camera is close enough to count pores. Wexler does not flatter anyone, and Irene Sharaff’s costumes help him: Martha comes home in a fur coat over a party dress and returns later in tight black trousers and a top she has chosen to make a point, and both outfits look like they belong to a different woman. Elizabeth Taylor is the reason to see it. She plays Martha loud, coarse, braying with laughter at her own jokes, and then, in the middle of a sentence, lets the face go slack and frightened. The moment that got us is a small one: Martha alone in the kitchen, late on, talking to nobody about the one person in the house she is afraid of. We had spent an hour finding her monstrous and we were suddenly sorry for her, and it was the stillness that did it, after so much noise. Richard Burton plays George in the opposite direction, quiet and precise, taking every insult and filing it. He is funnier than Taylor, and colder, and when he finally raises his voice it lands because he has waited so long. George Segal and Sandy Dennis have the harder job, because Nick and Honey are there to be used. Segal is good at the slow realisation that he is not the guest but the entertainment. Dennis plays Honey as a woman who has never had a strong drink or a strong opinion and is trying both tonight; she is pitched high, all giggles and sudden nausea, and we found her wearing in the first half and right in the second. The roadhouse scene, with Agnes Flanagan and Frank Flanagan as the waitress and the manager watching four drunks dance, is the film’s one breath of outside air. The cost of Nichols’s approach is that there is no let-up. Albee wrote a play in acts, with intervals in which an audience could recover. Sam O’Steen cuts the film so that one round leads straight into the next, and by the ninety-minute mark we were tired, and not always in the way the film intended. There is a difference between a marriage that is exhausting and a film that is, and this one crosses the line more than once. Alex North’s score, a gentle guitar-and-strings theme that sounds like it belongs to a kinder film, is used sparingly, and the contrast is a good joke the first time and a slightly smug one later. The film is also more literal than the play. On stage the son, and the whole history George and Martha keep rewriting, can hover between fact and story. On screen, with Wexler’s camera insisting on the real wallpaper and the real ice in the real glass, the games look less like invention and more like cruelty. That is a choice, and a defensible one, but it makes the last half hour heavier going than it need be. We will not say how the night ends. Nichols made *The Graduate* the following year and became a very different sort of director, one who moved the camera and cut for rhythm. This is the film where he learned how much a close-up can carry, and how long you can hold on a face before the audience wants to look away. He holds too long, sometimes. But he had four actors who could take it. It is a 12 certificate, and the language that shocked cinemas in 1967 will not shock anyone now. Watch it with someone you have been married to for a while. Do not watch it on the night of an argument. *Fi1m score 86, published 20 September 2026.* ## What the critics say The reviews are uniformly positive. Praise clusters on Elizabeth Taylor as Martha, with several critics calling it the best work she has done, and on Richard Burton, whose mix of passivity and real aggression a few single out over her. Mike Nichols, in his first feature, gets credit for keeping nearly all of Albee’s language while bringing the camera in close enough that the dialogue plays as film rather than filmed theatre. One critic finds the opening credits, a night walk across campus, oddly affecting. Reservations are few and mild. Time Out thinks the playing is too relentless for realism when the material is at least half fantasy, and Empire calls the experience excruciating, if often painfully funny. The spread is narrow: no review dips below the warm end, and the recent notices sit close to the trade reviews of 1966. The older critics stress how shocking the language was for its time; the newer ones note how little of the heat has gone out of it. ### Reviews we read (7) - **The Hollywood Reporter**, James Powers (90/100, inferred): The critic declares the film a motion picture masterpiece, an instant classic that will sweep the Oscars and succeed at the box office without compromise. Nichols receives the greatest credit for the implacable engagement the film creates for its audience, while the adaptation preserves nearly all of Albee's language and vitality. [Read](https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/whos-afraid-virginia-woolf-read-750750/) - **Variety**, Variety Staff (90/100, inferred): The film transforms Albee's powerful drama into a brilliant motion picture through strong adaptation, production, and direction by Mike Nichols in his feature debut, along with four outstanding performances. Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton deliver standout portrayals that capture the characters' complex mix of sensuality, spite, and tenderness. [Read](https://variety.com/1965/film/reviews/who-s-afraid-of-virginia-woolf-3-1200420919/) - **The Guardian** (85/100, inferred): The critic celebrates the enduring power of Mike Nichols’ 1966 debut as a sizzling, gut-busting adaptation that has kept the play in the cultural zeitgeist for six decades. Particular praise goes to Elizabeth Taylor’s searing, ferocious yet vulnerable performance as Martha, which crackles with emotional electricity alongside Richard Burton. [Read](https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2026/mar/25/whos-afraid-of-virginia-woolf-60-year-anniversary-elizabeth-taylor-george-segal) - **Film Comment**, Richard Combs (80/100, inferred): The critic highlights the film's opening credits sequence as strangely affecting, with its nighttime campus walk and greenhouse imagery suggesting buried lives and alternative possibilities for the characters. It notes how the adaptation marks Nichols' successful shift from theater to a more cinematic style, using close-ups effectively to stress Albee's dialogue. [Read](https://www.filmcomment.com/matters-of-life-and-death-mike-nichols/) - **Time Out**, GA (4/5): The critic finds Edward Albee's vitriolic stage portrayal translated grainily and effectively to the screen. Taylor delivers what is probably her finest performance as the blowsy harridan Martha, Burton is solid if not quite as hammy as usual, and the verbal fireworks are surprisingly convincing, though the film is played too relentlessly for realism when the subject is at least half fantasy. [Read](https://www.timeout.com/movies/whos-afraid-of-virginia-woolf) - **Empire**, David Parkinson (75/100, inferred): The critic praises the film's intense, close-up focus on the Burtons' performances and its shocking language for the era, calling it an excruciating but often painfully funny experience that was a commercial success despite production difficulties. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/afraid-virginia-woolf-review/) - **Eye for Film**, Jennie Kermode (90/100, inferred): The critic highlights the film's complex, unflinching close-up of a damaged marriage and praises the lead performances, calling Taylor's a career best and Burton the standout for his mix of passive and real aggression. [Read](https://www.eyeforfilm.co.uk/review/whos-afraid-of-virginia-woolf-1966-film-review-by-jennie-kermode) ## Details - **Director:** Mike Nichols - **Director:** Mike Nichols - **Screenplay:** Ernest Lehman - **Cinematography:** Haskell Wexler - **Editor:** Sam O'Steen - **Music:** Alex North - **Production design:** Richard Sylbert - **Costume design:** Irene Sharaff - **Producer:** Ernest Lehman - **Cast:** Elizabeth Taylor as Martha; Richard Burton as George; George Segal as Nick; Sandy Dennis as Honey; Agnes Flanagan as Roadhouse Waitress (uncredited); Frank Flanagan as Roadhouse Manager (uncredited) - **Runtime:** 2h 11m - **Certificate (MPA):** NR - **Release (the US):** 22 June 1966 - **Genres:** Drama - **Budget:** $8 million - **Box office:** $34 million - **Trailer:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppeMfoKdbAY ## Where to watch in the US - Amazon Prime Video: rent $3.99, hd - Amazon Prime Video: buy $9.99, hd *Checked 2026-09-20.* Also available in: AU, BE, BR, CA, CZ, DK, ES, FI, FR, GB, IE, LT, NL, NO, PL, PT, RO, SE, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## Awards - Academy Awards 1967: Best Actor (nominated); Best Director (nominated); Best Film Editing (nominated); Best Original Score (nominated); Best Sound (nominated); Best Supporting Actor (nominated); Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay (nominated); Best Actress (won); Best Art Direction, Black and White (won); Best Cinematography, Black-and-White (won); Best Costume Design, Black-and-White (won); Best Supporting Actress (won) ## If you liked this - *A Streetcar Named Desire* (1951), Fi1m 88: Another stage play kept nearly whole, with the heat turned all the way up — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/a-streetcar-named-desire.md) - *Scenes from a Marriage* (1973): Bergman does the same autopsy in Swedish, slower, and without the guests - *Festen* (1998), Fi1m 85: A Danish family dinner where the speeches go badly wrong, shot on a handheld camera — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-celebration.md) - *Carnage* (2011): Two couples, one flat, eighty minutes, and the politeness lasts about ten - *The Graduate* (1967), Fi1m 86: Nichols a year later, with the camera finally allowed to move — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/the-graduate.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. 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