Cuckoo’s Nest ‘real life’
‘‘The Communist Party was my Nurse Ratched.’’
Milos Forman on the character in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Milos Forman, director; b February 18, 1932, Cˇ a´ slav, Czech Republic; d April 13, Danbury, Connecticut, US; aged 86.
Milos Forman directed only nine films in the 50 years in which he lived in the United States after leaving his native Czechoslovakia in
1968, but two of them were Oscarwinning smashes as uplifting as anything seen in the cinema — Amadeus
(1984) and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).
Forman’s early years under communism made him an outsider who resisted the system, and this became the theme of much of his work. It was perhaps most obviously embodied in Cuckoo’s Nest, one of the seminal films of the 1970s.
Jack Nicholson plays a rebellious criminal who fakes mental illness, believing an asylum will be an easier place than prison to serve his sentence. His nemesis is Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher), who encapsulates the abuse of power driven by the conviction that the ends justify the means. Madness, affording a kind of liberty, would become another motif in Forman’s work.
‘‘To me it was not just literature but real life, the life I lived in Czechoslovakia,’’ he said of Ken Kesey’s
1962 novel, the source for the film. ‘‘The Communist Party was my Nurse Ratched, telling me what I could and could not do.’’
Despite his affinity for the material, he revealed that the producer Michael Douglas had chosen him chiefly because he was little-known and therefore affordable. In fact, Kirk Douglas, who owned the rights, had sent him the book some years previously, having seen one of his early subversive films, but it had been intercepted by the Czech authorities.
Forman defined cinema as the search for ‘‘unrepeatable moments’’, and on the set of Cuckoo’s Nest he achieved this by devices such as insisting that the cast stay in character even at lunch, and by using two cameras so that they never knew when they were in shot. He also mixed among them genuine patients from the Oregon psychiatric hospital at which much of it was filmed.
He was born Jan Tomas Forman in Caslav, a town east of Prague. His father, as he thought, was Rudolf Forman, a teacher who joined a resistance group and died in a concentration camp.
His mother, Anna, who ran a hotel, was denounced to the Gestapo by a grocer hoping to save himself; she died in Auschwitz. Much later, Forman learnt from a woman who had known his mother in the camp that he was the product of an affair with an architect.
He studied screenwriting at Prague’s Performing Arts Academy, a hotbed of intellectuals opposed to the regime; his literature teacher was Milan Kundera. Forman had been smitten by the cinema when on his first visit aged six he saw an adaptation of Smetana’s opera The Bartered Bride, the audience singing along since everyone knew the words. Later influences were Charlie Chaplin – to whom Forman sent a script as a student – and Vittorio De Sica’s secular parable Miracle in Milan (1951).
He was in Paris when the Prague Spring was crushed in 1968. He fled to America, and was eventually able to bring his family. In 1971 he made his first film in the US, Taking Off, a generationgap comedy. It was well-received but made little impact at the box office; he ended up owing the studio $500. His last release of note was Goya’s Ghosts, with Natalie Portman, in 2006.
Forman married first, in 1958, the actress Jana Brejchova. In 1964, he married another actress, Vera Kresadlova. They separated in 1969, and divorced in 1999, when he married Martina Zborilova. She survives him with their sons, and his twin sons by his second marriage.
— The Daily Telegraph