Oscar-winning film director Milos Forman dies at age 86
LOS ANGELES—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 Saturday. He was 86.
Forman died about 2 a.m. Saturday at Danbury Hospital, near his home in Warren, Connecticut, according to a statement released by the former director’s agent, Dennis Aspland. Aspland said Forman’s wife, Martina, notified him of the death.
When Forman arrived in Hollywood in the 1960s, he lacked both money and English skills, but carried a portfolio of Czechoslovakian films much admired 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 entree to Hollywood’s studios, but his early suggestions for film projects were quickly rejected. Among them were an adaptation of Franz Kafka’s novel “Amerika” and a comedy starring entertainer Jimmy Durante as a wealthy bear hunter in Czechoslovakia.
After his first U.S. film, 1971’s “Taking Off,” flopped, Forman didn’t get to direct a major feature again for years. During part of that time by covered the decathlon at the 1972 Olympics for the documentary “Visions of Eight.”
Actor Michael Douglas gave Forman a second chance, hiring him to direct “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest,” which Douglas co-produced. The 1975 film, based on Ken Kesey’s novel about a misfit who leads mental institution inmates 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, who worked meticulously, spending months with screenwriters and overseeing every aspect of production, didn’t release another film until 1979’s “Hair.”
The musical, about rebellious 1960s-era American youth, appealed to a director who had witnessed his own share of youthful rebellion against communist repression in Czechoslovakia. But by the time it came out, America’s brief period of student revolt had long since faded, and the public wasn’t interested.
“Ragtime” followed in 1981. The adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s novel, notable for Forman’s ability to persuade aging Connecticut neighbor Jimmy Cagney to end 20 years of retirement and play the corrupt police commissioner, also disappointed.
Forman returned to top form three years later when he released “Amadeus.”
Based on Peter Shaffer’s play, it portrayed 18th century musical genius Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a foulmouthed man-child, with lesser composer Salieri as his shadowy nemesis. It captured seven Academy Awards, including best picture, best director and best actor (for F. Murray Abraham as Salieri).
Hunting for locations, Forman realized Prague was the only European capital that had changed little since Mozart’s time, but returning there filled him with dread.
He had been in Paris when the communists crushed the Prague Spring movement in 1968, and he hadn’t returned home, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1975. The Czech government, realizing the money to be made by letting “Amadeus” be filmed in Prague, allowed Forman to come home, and the public hailed his return.