Miloš Forman

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Jan Tomáš Forman (born February 18, 1932), better known as Miloš Forman, is a film director, actor, screenwriter and professor.

Forman was born in Čáslav, Czechoslovakia (now Čáslav, Czech Republic) to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother. He was orphaned at a very young age when his parents died at the concentration camp in Auschwitz; his father was imprisoned due to membership in a Czech Resistance group, his mother imprisoned for dealing in illegal grocery trade. Forman writes in his autobiography that both death sentences were issued by a German who had worked for them, and Forman believes he wanted revenge for having been subservient to what he thought were racially-lower Czechs.

After the war, Miloš attended King George College public school in the spa town Poděbrady, where his fellow students were Václav Havel and the Mašín brothers. Later on he studied screenwriting at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. He directed several Czech comedies in Czechoslovakia. However, in 1968 when the USSR and its Warsaw Pact allies invaded the country to end the Prague Spring, he was in Paris negotiating for the production of his first American film.

The Czech studio that he worked for fired him, claiming that he was out of the country illegally. He moved to New York, where he later became a professor of film at Columbia University and co-chair (with Frantisek Daniel) of Columbia's film division. One of his proteges was future director James Mangold, who had advised the young filmmaker about scriptwriting.

In spite of initial difficulties, he started directing in his new home country, and achieved success in 1975 with the adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which won five Academy Awards including one for direction. In 1977, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Other notable successes have been Amadeus, which won eight Academy Awards, and The People vs. Larry Flynt.

Forman's early movies are still very popular among Czechs. Many of the situations and phrases made it into common use: for example, the Czech term zhasnout (to switch lights off) from The Firemen's Ball, associated with petty theft in the movie, has been used to describe the large-scale asset stripping happening in the country during the 1990s.

In 1997 he received the Crystal Globe award for outstanding artistic contribution to world cinema at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

Forman co-starred alongside Edward Norton in the actor's directorial debut Keeping the Faith (2000) as the wise friend to Norton's young, conflicted priest.

Forman's two sons Petr Forman and Matěj Forman are also movie and theatre actors.

[edit] Filmography

Preceded by
Francis Ford Coppola
for The Godfather Part II		 Academy Award for Best Director
1975
for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest		 Succeeded by
John G. Avildsen
for Rocky
Preceded by
James L. Brooks
for Terms of Endearment		 Academy Award for Best Director
1984
for Amadeus		 Succeeded by
Sydney Pollack
for Out of Africa

[edit] External links


 v • d • e 
Miloš Forman's Films
Black Peter (1964)• Loves of a Blonde (1965)• The Firemen's Ball (1967)• Taking Off (1971)• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)• Hair (1979)• Ragtime (1981)• Amadeus (1984)• Valmont (1989)• The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996)• Man on the Moon (1999) • Goya's Ghosts (2006)• Amarillo Slim
Shorts: Audition (1963)• Kdyby ty muziky nebyly (1963)
Co-Director: Laterna magika II (1960)• Dobře placená procházka (TV) (1966) I Miss Sonia Henie (1971)• Vision of Eight (1973)•
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