She revolutionised stand-up comedy and was among the many first comedians of the sound era to bring her unique skills to writing and directing movies, akin to A Latest Leaf (1971) and The Heartbreak Kid (1972). Her script-doctoring saved Warren Beatty’s Reds (1981) and Sydney Pollack’s Tootsie (1982). Her screenplays for Heaven Can Wait (1978) and Primary Colours (1998) earned Oscar nominations.

And yet Elaine May, who at 86 is about to return to Broadway this autumn in Kenneth Lonergan’s The Waverly Gallery, stays criminally unsung for somebody of her talents and influence. Little doubt Ishtar (1987), her unaccountably reviled and remarkably prescient allegory of blundering Americans within the Middle East, put an end to her directorial profession. Still, like the girl herself, it was startlingly original.

Dazzled, dazed and perhaps intimidated by May, Richard Burton was the voice of conventional wisdom about this unconventional figure. He remembered their single encounter in his diary: “Elaine was formidable… one of the crucial intelligent, beautiful and witty women I had ever met. I hoped I might never see her again.” Happily, his isn’t the last word on the topic. Working alongside Mike Nichols, May was present on the creation of improvisational comedy. Conception and gestation took place at Chicago’s Compass Theater, the forerunner of Second City – in the course of the early Fifties. Nichols and May were occasional students on the University of Chicago; Susan Sontag was a classmate. While all three would go on to put in writing and direct movies, Nichols and May toiled for a time because the particle physicists of improv, dedicated to stripping sketches all the way down to their atomic level. Of their earliest experiments they made a very important discovery. All human encounters – and thus, the human comedy itself – could possibly be divided into three categories: seductions, negotiations or fights.

Within the Fifties, when American comedy consisted of Bob Hope one-liners and Jerry Lewis pratfalls, Nichols and May improvised stunningly funny vignettes of moms and sons on the phone, co-workers on the water cooler and teenagers on a date. They didn’t spoof celebrities. They didn’t send up politicians. They didn’t do stand-up jokes. Their sketches weren’t rehearsed and polished, they gave the impression to be mined within the moment. Here was the comedy of discomfort, without delay ticklish and anxious.

On Broadway with their wildly successful and influential An Evening with Mike Nichols and Elaine May in 1960, these two students of Stanislavski-inspired acting – she had studied with Moscow Art Theatre acolyte Maria Ouspenskaya and he with Actors Studio guru Lee Strasberg – popularised their latest form. Electrified by their truth of character and wit, a young gagwriter named Woody Allen approached the duo’s agent Jack Rollins, volunteering to put in writing for them. He was told that they didn’t write, they generated their very own material. From Lily Tomlin to Tina Fey, from Albert Brooks to Chris Rock, Nichols and May influenced generations of comedians.

The trend the duo instigated in American comedy paralleled that in popular music. Where once a songwriter like Cole Porter wrote for many alternative voices, singer-songwriters like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan began writing for themselves. Woody Allen and Joan Rivers began their careers turning out jokes for established comics, but were soon creating material about and for themselves. Nichols and May, Allen and Brooks burrowed into themselves, encouraging listeners to laugh less at puns and punch-lines or contrived situations, and more in recognition of their very own foibles.

So what does this must do with the movies that May – and Nichols – made, individually and together? In uneasy scenarios that hinted at dark subtexts, the pair introduced serious comedy to the films, comedy with almost painful silences and characters who were shockingly unsympathetic.

The gregarious Nichols would go on to direct 20-odd movies, two of which were written by – and Lord knows what number of more doctored by – May. His movies, especially Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) and The Graduate (1967), redefined the Hollywood mainstream. As he worked in so many alternative genres and tones, it’s hard to make a case for him as an auteur.

May, against this, the elusive J.D. Salinger of comedy, was completely happy within the eddies writing and directing 4 movies which have surprising consistency. In A Latest Leaf, The Heartbreak Kid, Mikey and Nicky (1976) and Ishtar, the viewer experiences something rare: a girl’s gimlet-eyed view of the varieties of male vanity and narcissism. Her movies are a series of seductions, negotiations and fights. Notable in May’s movies, and in most of the screenplays she wrote for other people, is the introduction of a fourth type of human encounter: betrayal. Along with her directorial debut, the black comedy A Latest Leaf, which May wrote and starred in, she became the primary woman since Ida Lupino (The Trouble with Angels in 1966) to direct a studio film. The central character is Henry, played by a surprisingly dapper Walter Matthau, a narcissistic playboy (is there every other kind?) who has burned through the family inheritance and is horrified by the prospect of working for a living.

Henry dresses like Cary Grant, has the morals of Jack the Ripper and believes the perfect solution to his financial plight is to wed an heiress and promptly get rid of her. Although his butler chastises Henry for attempting to preserve a lifestyle that was dead before he was born, the paupered heir finds a mark in Henrietta (Elaine May), a fantastically wealthy university professor and botanist who, in the best way that the hero of Preston Sturges’s screwball classic The Lady Eve (1941) is more comfortable with snakes than people, has eyes just for ferns. On their honeymoon, he pores over ‘A Beginner’s Guide to Toxicology’ and he or she haplessly struggles to slide right into a Grecian dress. Like almost every part May touched, it boasts nuanced performances, is drolly funny and is in a category of its own.

May’s theme on this, as with lots of her future movies, is that men are turkeys in peacock plumage. And that they might, without hesitation, betray those closest to them. Given the guilelessness of Henrietta and the cynicism of Henry, the taste of that is distinctively sweet and sour. May’s initial cut, which reportedly took 10 months to assemble, was said to be three hours long. She hid the reels but they were seized by Paramount and edited down. The resulting film was wryly funny and perversely romantic, reversing the Genesis story by starting in cynical times and ending in an unspoiled Eden; inexplicably, May tried to disavow this critical success.

The post-production drama surrounding A Latest Leaf was a preview of May’s subsequent truculent relationships with studio authority. If you happen to’re Orson Welles or Preston Sturges, such belligerence burnishes your repute. If you happen to’re Elaine May, it tarnishes it. Secure to say, though, that neither Welles nor Sturges so consistently overran budget, shot a lot coverage, or hid negatives from the studio as May did.

The Heartbreak Kid likewise examined betrayal inside marriage, her second film in a row a few groom on his honeymoon who desires to unburden himself of his bride. This time, Charles Grodin stars as Lenny Cantrow, a callow newlywed who abandons his radiantly peculiar brunette bride Lila Kolodny, (played by May’s daughter Jeannie Berlin), with a view to court blonde beauty Cybill Shepherd. Of the numerous consonances between May’s The Heartbreak Kid and Nichols’s The Graduate, essentially the most obvious is that each are about young men who effectively trade of their first sexual partner for a latermodel Wasp princess.

Because May makes Lenny’s Jewishness explicit – in a way Nichols had not done with Benjamin Braddock – it’s easy to see in her satire of the romantic comedy how his libido is twisted up in Jewish self-hate and sexual fantasies of the unattainable blonde. This rueful comedy about desire of the Other is as trenchant as Philip Roth.

Those that doubt that movies are different when a girl is behind the camera may be surprised on the extent to which May’s men, from Henry and Lenny to the title characters in Mikey and Nicky, to the Ishtar friends Chuck and Lyle, are man babies who want what they need (sex, money, fame) and need it now. Then again, her women – especially Henrietta the botanist and Shirra the guerrilla in Ishtar – have inner lives and goals. For these women, men are at best a nice diversion or at worst a waste of time. Where May’s first two directorial efforts involve treachery inside a wedding, her second two revolve around betrayal inside a friendship. Mikey and Nicky (note the similarity between the names of her lead characters and the given name and surname of her one-time partner) was a passion project. Those that knew her within the Chicago days remember her taking notes for a play about two low-level mob retainers, childhood friends, who activate each other.

The drama stars John Cassavetes as frantic Nicky, a bookie who’s embezzled money from a mob boss and accurately suspects he’s the goal of a success man. Peter Falk co-stars as Mikey, the calmer one, accustomed to cleansing up Nicky’s messes. Set over a dark night of the soul within the flophouses and dive bars of May’s birthplace Philadelphia, this nocturne (versus noir) is the outlier of the director’s profession. There are moments of bleak humour, but on the entire the film’s tone is a requiem for toxic masculinity, with one female character pushing back on the misogynistic protagonists.

Its desperation makes it feel very very similar to a Cassavetes movie, the perfect one he never made. During production, the budget ballooned from $1.8 million to $4.3 million and May shot 1.4 million feet of film, thrice the length of Gone with the Wind (1939). But for May’s battles with the studio about overages, and holding two reels hostage, the film may need received its due. Alas, in late 1976 the film was dumped, unceremoniously, in only just a few cinemas in a cut rife with continuity errors. May and an associate bought back the print and the director’s cut is now in circulation. It might be 11 years until her final feature film, Ishtar.

Within the intervening years she was brought in to cowrite, rewrite or doctor movies, making fortunes for the studio bosses she had so exasperated. During this middle period of her Hollywood profession, May increasingly handled the themes of politics and sexual politics. Beatty credits her for improving his hit film Heaven Can Wait (during which Julie Christie was a political protester) and for honing the script of his Oscar-winning Reds (1980), about early Twentieth-century American socialists John Reed and Louise Bryant. Said Dustin Hoffman of Tootsie (1982), a delicate gender-bender during which a failed actor achieves success in drag as an actress, “Elaine is the one who made the movie work,” noting that she gave it structure, created the Bill Murray character, wrote Hoffman’s confessional monologue and deepened the feminine parts.

Beatty and Hoffman thanked May by signing on to Ishtar (named for the Babylonian goddess of affection and war), a movie that might, unjustly, derail the careers of all three. The actors play Chuck and Lyle, supremely untalented singer-songwriters, unsuitable for domestic consumption and so devoid of self-awareness that their agent reckons they may be useful to the CIA abroad. From this premise May constructs a three-tier farce about showbiz wannabes, clueless men and much more clueless Americans.

Thirty years ago audiences greeted Ishtar with near-universal contempt. Today, revisionists say it’s a misunderstood masterpiece. It was funny then. It’s even funnier now if you happen to regard it as an allegory of American policy within the Middle East. Here they’re, Chuck and Lyle, two dunces on a blind camel wandering the desert as buzzards circle overhead, one allied with the CIA, the opposite with Arab revolutionaries. It’s a narrative that makes one think that surely it is less complicated for a blind camel to undergo the attention of a needle than for Americans to assist achieve peace within the Middle East. While May would make a 2016 television documentary about her late comic partner Mike Nichols, Ishtar effectively ended her profession as a feature filmmaker. Within the Nineteen Nineties, though, she earned fresh acclaim as a political satirist. Her adaptation of La Cage aux folles for Nichols’s The Birdcage (1996) resulted in a raucous and giddily funny film contrasting liberal and reactionary family values. Robin Williams and Nathan Lane are gay entertainers whose son is engaged to the daughter of a hypocritical conservative Republican senator (Gene Hackman) and his wife (Dianne Wiest). May’s adaptation of Joe Klein’s Primary Colours, also for Nichols, is an unapologetic political tragicomedy concerning the chasm between the ideals and the actions of a Bill Clinton-like Southern Democrat (John Travolta) running for president. Emma Thompson plays the Hillary-like wife he betrays.

If as a director, May stays something of a cult figure, the two-time Oscar nominated screenwriter is a provocative social satirist to rank alongside Sturges, eternally desperate to puncture the inflated egos of millionaires, mobsters and politicians and the institutions they hide behind.