Milos Forman (Feb. 18, 1932-April 13, 2018) was orphaned by the Holocaust His mother, Anna Formanova, was murdered in 1943 at Auschwitz, and the man he believed to be his father, Rudolf Forman, was murdered in 1944 at the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Later in life, he discovered that his biological father was Jewish architect, Otto Kohn, who survived the Holocaust. Close relatives and friends of his parents raised Forman. He was sent to a boarding school in Podebrady, Czechoslovakia, where one of his classmates was Vaclav Havel, who later became the last president of Czechoslovakia and the first president of the Czech Republic, now known as Czechia.
Forman made such movies as Black Peter, about a teenager who fails to assert himself; Loves of a Blonde, about the unrequited love of a female factory worker; and The Firemen’s Ball, in which thieves steal raffle items as well as the gift for the fire department’s retiring chairman. The three movies, part of the Czechoslovak New Wave, embarrassed the country’s rulers who clung to the propaganda that everything was perfect under the communist system.
Fired during the Prague Spring in 1968, Forman moved to New York where he later became a Columbia University film professor and in 1977 a naturalized U.S. citizen. His first movie in the U.S. was Taking Off, which featured a teenager taking off from home, and her parents taking off their clothes in a strip poker game. The film was unsuccessful. In 1975, Forman had his first big hit in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, about life in a psychiatric ward, which won him an Oscar as best director. In 1979, he directed Hair, based on the Broadway musical but it did not do well financially. In 1981, he directed Ragtime, based on a novel by E.L. Doctorow, and in 1985, he won another Academy Award for directing Amadeus, about the life of Mozart.
Valmont, Forman’s version of Dangerous Liaisons, a movie about seductions in monarchic France, was a box office flop. On the other hand, Forman’s 1996 biopic of a pornographer, The People vs. Larry Flynt garnered him an Oscar nomination, but not a victory. The 1999 film Man on the Moon” about the life of comedian Andy Kaufman, netted Forman a Golden Globe for directing. In 2006 Goya’s Ghosts was released to mixed reviews and box office struggles.
Forman was married three times. His first wife was Jana Rejchova, a Czech movie star. Next was Czech actress Vera Kresadlova, who gave birth to his twin sons, Petr and Matej. He and his third wife, Martina Zbonlova, also had twin sons, Jim and Andy.
Tomorrow, February 19: Annie Meyer
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SDJW condensation of a Wikipedia article