Director Milos Forman dies
Czech filmmaker Milos Forman, whose American movies One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Amadeus won a deluge of Academy Awards, including best director Oscars, died on Saturday. He was 86.
When he arrived in Hollywood in the late 1960s, Forman was lacking in both money and English skills, but carrying a portfolio of Czechoslavkian films much admired internationally for their quirky, lighthearted spirit. Among them were Black Peter, Loves of a Blonde and The Fireman’s Ball.
The orphan of Nazi Holocaust victims, Forman had abandoned his homeland after communist troops invaded in 1968 and crushed a brief period of political and artistic freedom known as the Prague Spring. In America, his record as a Czech filmmaker was enough to gain him entry to Hollywood’s studios, but his early suggestions for film projects were quickly rejected.
After his first US film, 1969’s Taking Off, flopped, Forman didn’t get a chance to direct a major feature again for five years.
Actor Michael Douglas gave Forman a second chance, hiring him to direct One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, which Douglas was co-producing. The film, based on Ken Kesey’s novel about a misfit who leads the inmates of a mental institution in a revolt against authority, captured every major Oscar at that year’s Academy Awards, the first film to do so since 1934’s It Happened One Night.
The winners included Jack Nicholson as lead actor, Louise Fletcher as lead actress, screenwriters Bo Goldman and Lawrence Hauben, Forman as director and the film itself for best picture.
The director didn’t release another film until 1979’s Hair.