Jan Tomáš "Miloš" Forman (; ; 18 February 1932 – 13 April 2018) was a Czech-American film director, screenwriter, actor, and professor who rose to fame in his native Czechoslovakia before emigrating to the United States in 1968. Throughout Forman's career he won two Academy Awards, a BAFTA Award, three Golden Globe Awards, a Golden Bear, a César Award, and the Czech Lion.
Forman was an important figure in the Czechoslovak New Wave. Film scholars and Czechoslovak authorities saw his 1967 film The Firemen's Ball as a biting satire on Eastern European Communism. The film was initially shown in theatres in his home country in the more reformist atmosphere of the Prague Spring. However, it was later banned by the Communist government after the invasion by the Warsaw Pact countries in 1968. Forman was subsequently forced to leave Czechoslovakia for the United States, where he continued making films.
He received two Academy Awards for Best Director for the psychological drama One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and the biographical drama Amadeus (1984). During this time, he also directed notable and acclaimed films such as Black Peter (1964), Loves of a Blonde (1965), Hair (1978), Ragtime (1981), Valmont (1989), The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) and Man on the Moon (1999).
Early life
Miloš Forman's childhood was marked by the early loss of his parents. His mother, Anna Formanová, was murdered in 1943 in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and his father, Rudolf Forman, in the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in 1944. Close relatives and friends of his parents raised him. After attending grammar school in Náchod, he went to a boarding school in Poděbrady following the end of the war; among his class-mates were Václav Havel and Jerzy Skolimowski.
Career
Along with cinematographer Miroslav Ondříček and long-time friend from school Ivan Passer, Forman filmed the silent documentary Semafor about the Semafor theater. Forman's first important production was Audition, a documentary about competing singers. He directed several Czech comedies in Czechoslovakia. He was in Paris negotiating the production of his first American film during the Prague Spring in 1968. His employer, a Czech studio, fired him, so he decided to move to the United States. He moved to New York, where he later became a professor of film at Columbia University in 1978 and co-chair (with his former teacher František Daniel) of Columbia's film department. One of his protégés was future director James Mangold, whom he mentored at Columbia. He regularly collaborated with cinematographer Miroslav Ondříček.
1964–1971
Black Peter is one of the first and most representative films of the Czechoslovak New Wave. It won the Golden Leopard award at the Locarno International Film Festival. It covers the first few days in the working life of a Czech teenager. In Czechoslovakia in 1964, the aimless Petr (Ladislav Jakim) starts work as a security guard in a busy self-service supermarket; unfortunately, he is so lacking in confidence that even when he sees shoplifters, he cannot bring himself to confront them. He is similarly tongue-tied with the lovely Asa (Pavla Martínková) and during the lectures about personal responsibility and the dignity of labor that his blustering father (Jan Vostrčil) delivers at home. Loves of a Blonde is one of the best–known movies of the Czechoslovak New Wave, and won awards at the Venice and Locarno film festivals. It was also nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1967.
In 1967, he directed The Firemen's Ball an original Czechoslovak–Italian co-production, this was Forman's first color film. It is one of the best–known movies of the Czechoslovak New Wave. On the face of it a naturalistic representation of an ill-fated social event in a provincial town, the film has been seen by both film scholars and the then-authorities in Czechoslovakia as a biting satire on East European Communism, which resulted in it being banned for many years in Forman's home country. The Czech term zhasnout (to switch lights off), associated with petty theft in the film, was used to describe the large-scale asset stripping that occurred in the country during the 1990s. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
"When Soviet tanks rumbled into Prague in August 1968, Forman was in Paris negotiating for the production of Taking Off (1971), his first American film. Claiming that he was out of the country illegally, his Czech studio fired him, forcing Forman to emigrate to New York"