MILOS FORMAN
Name: Jan Tomáš Forman
Born: 18 February 1932 Čáslav, Czechoslovakia
Jan Tomáš Forman (born February 18, 1932), better known as Milos Forman, is an actor,
screenwriter, professor and two-time Academy Award-winning film director.
Forman was born in Čáslav, Czechoslovakia (present-day Czech Republic) to a
Jewish father and a Protestant mother. He was orphaned at a very young age when
his parents died at the German 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.
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 for which he worked 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 his former teacher František
Daniel) of Columbia's film division. One of his proteges was future director
James Mangold, whom Forman had advised 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 for which he received a Best Director Academy Award
Nomination and a golden globe win.
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.
In 2006 he received the Hanno R. Ellenbogen Citizenship Award presented by the
Prague Society for International Cooperation.
Forman's two sons Petr Forman and Matěj Forman are also movie and theatre actors.
Asteroid 11333 Forman was named after Milos Forman.
Name: Jan Tomáš Forman
Born: 18 February 1932 Čáslav, Czechoslovakia
Jan Tomáš Forman (born February 18, 1932), better known as Milos Forman, is an actor,
screenwriter, professor and two-time Academy Award-winning film director.
Forman was born in Čáslav, Czechoslovakia (present-day Czech Republic) to a
Jewish father and a Protestant mother. He was orphaned at a very young age when
his parents died at the German 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.
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 for which he worked 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 his former teacher František
Daniel) of Columbia's film division. One of his proteges was future director
James Mangold, whom Forman had advised 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 for which he received a Best Director Academy Award
Nomination and a golden globe win.
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.
In 2006 he received the Hanno R. Ellenbogen Citizenship Award presented by the
Prague Society for International Cooperation.
Forman's two sons Petr Forman and Matěj Forman are also movie and theatre actors.
Asteroid 11333 Forman was named after Milos Forman.