Background and career
Jan Tomáš "Miloš" Forman (; Czech: [ˈmɪloʃ ˈforman]; 18 February 1932 – 13 April 2018) was a Czech and American film director, screenwriter, actor, and professor. He rose to fame in his native Czechoslovakia before emigrating to the United States in 1968. Over a career spanning six decades, Forman 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, one for the psychological drama One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) and one for 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 (1979), Ragtime (1981), Valmont (1989), The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) and Man on the Moon (1999). One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus have been inducted into the National Film Registry.
Miloš Forman's childhood was marked by the early loss of his parents. Forman was born in Čáslav, Czechoslovakia (now the Czech Republic) to Anna Švábová Forman, who ran a summer hotel. His parents attended a Protestant church. He believed that his father was Rudolf Forman. During the Nazi occupation, Rudolf, a member of the Czech Resistance, was arrested for distributing banned books, and reportedly died from typhus in Mittelbau-Dora, a subcamp of the Buchenwald concentration camp in May 1944. Another version has it that he died in Mittelbau-Dora during interrogation. Forman's mother had been murdered in Auschwitz in March the previous year. Forman said that he did not fully understand what had happened to them until he saw footage of the concentration camps when he was 16. Forman was subsequently raised by two uncles and by family friends. His older brother Pavel was a painter twelve years his senior, and he emigrated to Australia after the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Forman later discovered that his biological father was in fact the Jewish architect Otto Kohn, a survivor of the Holocaust, and Forman was thus a half-brother of mathematician Joseph J. Kohn. In his youth, Forman wanted to become a theatrical producer. After attending grammar school in Náchod, he went to the King George boarding school in Poděbrady, following the end of the war; fellow students included Václav Havel, the Mašín brothers, and future film-makers Ivan Passer and Jerzy Skolimowski. He later studied screenwriting at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. He was assistant of Alfréd Radok, creator of Laterna Magika. Along with fellow filmmaker and friend Passer, he left Czechoslovakia for the United States during the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in summer 1968.
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.
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" The first movie Forman made in the United States, Taking Off, shared the Grand Prix (ex aequo)(second prize) with Johnny Got His Gun at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival. The film starred Lynn Carlin and Buck Henry, and also featured, as Jeannie, Linnea Heacock, discovered, with friends, in Washington Square Park. It was critically panned and left Forman struggling to find work. Forman later said that it did so poorly he ended up owing the studio $500.
His next film was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975). Despite the failure of Taking Off, producers Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz hired him to direct the adaptation of Ken Kesey's cult novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Forman later said they hired him because he was in their price range. Starring Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher, the adaptation was a critical and commercial success. The film won Oscars in the five most important categories: Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay. One of only three films in history to do so (alongside It Happened One Night and The Silence of the Lambs), it firmly established Forman's reputation. Arthur Knight, film critic of The Hollywood Reporter declared in his review, "With One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Forman takes his rightful place as one of our most creative young directors. His casting is inspired, his sense of milieu is assured, and he could probably wring Academy Award performances from a stone." The success of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest allowed Forman to direct his long-planned film version of Hair in 1979, a rock musical based on the Broadway musical by James Rado, Gerome Ragni and Galt MacDermot. The film starred Treat Williams, John Savage and Beverly D'Angelo. It was disowned by the writers of the original musical, and, although it received positive reviews, it did not do well financially. In 1981, he directed Ragtime, the American drama based on the 1975 historical novel Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow. Forman's next important achievement was Amadeus (1984), an adaptation of Peter Shaffer's play of the same name. Retelling the story of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Antonio Salieri, it starred Tom Hulce, Elizabeth Berridge and F. Murray Abraham. The film was internationally acclaimed and won eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor (for Abraham). Chicago Sun-Times film critic Roger Ebert praised the film, writing: "Amadeus is a magnificent film, full and tender and funny and charming -- and, at the end, sad and angry, too, because in the character of Salieri it has given us a way to understand not only greatness, but our own lack of it". Forman's adaptation, Valmont (1989) of Pierre Choderlos de Laclos's novel Les Liaisons dangereuses had its premiere on 17 November 1989. Another film adaptation by Stephen Frears from the same source material had been released the previous year, and overshadowed Forman's adaptation. The film starred Colin Firth, Meg Tilly and Annette Bening. The film received mixed reviews with critic of the Los Angeles Times Sheila Benson, praising its gorgeous costumes, but noting its inferior quality to Dangerous Liaisons. She wrote: "Valmont is gorgeous, and for a while you can coast on its costumes and production details....But to consider Valmont in the light of Baudelaire’s words on Les Liaisons Dangereuses--”This book, if it burns, must burn like ice”—is to see just how far down this ice has been watered."
