Fired while abroad in 1968, Miloš Forman went on to win two directing Oscars
When Soviet tanks entered Prague in August 1968, Miloš Forman was in Paris pitching his first American film. His Czech studio sacked him, so he moved to New York. Within a decade he had made One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and later Amadeus brought him a second Oscar for directing.
Forman was born in Čáslav in 1932 and lost both parents during the Nazi occupation. The man he believed was his father, a resistance member arrested for spreading banned books, died at Mittelbau-Dora in 1944; his mother was murdered at Auschwitz the year before. He said he grasped what had happened only when he saw camp footage at 16. Much later he learned his biological father was the Jewish architect Otto Kohn, a Holocaust survivor. Raised by uncles and family friends, he boarded at a school in Poděbrady alongside Václav Havel and future directors Ivan Passer and Jerzy Skolimowski.
He studied screenwriting in Prague and became a leading voice of the Czechoslovak New Wave. Black Peter, about a timid teenager working as a supermarket guard who cannot face shoplifters, won the Golden Leopard at Locarno. The Firemen's Ball of 1967, his first colour film, looked like a gentle comedy about a botched village party, but officials read it as a satire on communism and banned it after the invasion. Its word for switching off the lights later became slang for the asset stripping of the 1990s.
America started badly. Taking Off shared a prize at Cannes in 1971 yet flopped so hard that Forman said he owed the studio $500. Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz then hired him for Ken Kesey's novel, partly, he joked, because he was cheap. Cuckoo's Nest swept the five top Oscars, a feat matched by only two other films. Amadeus, adapted from Peter Shaffer's play about Mozart and Salieri, won eight Academy Awards including best picture.
Not everything landed. Hair was disowned by the musical's creators, and Valmont was eclipsed by a rival adaptation of the same novel released a year earlier. The People vs. Larry Flynt earned him another directing nomination, and Man on the Moon won Jim Carrey a Golden Globe. He taught film at Columbia University from 1978, mentoring James Mangold. His last film, Goya's Ghosts, came out in 2006, and he died in 2018.
Source: Miloš Forman
