Film director Milos Forman poses in Paris in 2009.MARTIN BUREAU/Getty Images
Milos Forman, a filmmaker who challenged Hollywood with his subversive touch, and twice directed movies that won the Oscar for best picture, died Friday. He was 86.
His death in Connecticut was confirmed by Dennis Aspland, Mr. Forman’s agent, and by Vlastislav Malek, a representative of his hometown, Caslav, in the Czech Republic.
A native of what was then Czechoslovakia, Mr. Forman moved to the United States in the late 1960s as a rebellious young filmmaker whose satirical bent was little welcomed at home in the wake of the 1968 Soviet invasion.
Just a few years later, Mr. Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – a tragicomic story of revolt and repression in a mental institution – won five Oscars, including those for best director and best picture.
The film put Mr. Forman in the front rank of those who struggled to make big, commercial films with countercultural sensibilities. His sympathy for the odd man out was always apparent, even as his movies grew in scope.
Amadeus, a 1984 adaptation of Peter Shaffer’s stage play, presented Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart as a genius who undermined authority with his art. Again, Oscars for best director and best picture were among its many honours.
Still, Mr. Forman, by then a U.S. citizen, said one of his greatest pleasures from the film –which was shot in Czechoslovakia – was the chance to return in triumph to his homeland.
“I’ve always done everything in my life to win,” Mr. Forman said of himself in a 1994 biography, Turnaround: A Memoir, written with Jan Novak.
Mr. Forman was caught up in the turmoil of German occupation not many years after his birth, in Caslav, on Feb. 18, 1932. Both his mother, born Anna Suabova, and the man he believed to be his father, a teacher named Rudolf Forman, had been separately seized by the Germans and killed in death camps.
For years, Mr. Forman vaguely told interviewers that he believed himself to be half-Jewish, although both parents attended a Protestant church. It was Mr. Novak, in researching Turnaround, who ended the mystery.
After the 1964 release of his first feature film, Black Peter – about the misadventures of a teenager beginning his work life – Mr. Forman was contacted by a woman who had been with his mother in Auschwitz, Mr. Novak learned and eventually reported. The woman explained that Mr. Forman was actually the son of a Jewish architect with whom Mr. Forman’s mother had an affair. In time, Mr. Forman found his biological father, who survived the war and was living in Peru.
Raised by foster parents, Mr. Forman attended film school in Prague, and first made his mark with his work on a film and theatre presentation at the 1958 Brussels World Exhibition. An early feature, The Loves of a Blonde, won attention on the international festival circuit in 1965. Another, The Firemen’s Ball, two years later, rubbed Czech officials the wrong way with its spoof of the firefighting bureaucracy, although Mr. Forman was already turning his attention to opportunities abroad.
When the Soviets invaded in August, 1968, Mr. Forman was in Paris negotiating to make a Hollywood film. His first American feature, a youth comedy called Taking Off, was released by Universal Pictures in 1971. It did so poorly, Mr. Forman later said, that he wound up owing the studio $500.
Through the early 1970s, Mr. Forman – a hearty bon vivant without means for the good life – went through a period of self-described depression. For much of that time, he holed up in New York’s Chelsea Hotel, sleeping through the days and communicating with émigré friends.
By then, he had been married twice, first to an actress, Jana Brejchova, then to another performer, Vera Kresadlova, who had remained in Czechoslovakia with their two sons, Petr and Matej.
In addition to Petr and Matej, he leaves Martina Formanova, his third wife; and his twin sons, James and Andrew, with Formanova.
In his memoir, Mr. Forman said the producers of Cuckoo’s Nest, Michael Douglas and Saul Zaentz, sought him out because “I seemed to be in their price range.” In fact, they had made a perfect match between filmmaker and material, in this case a cult novel by Ken Kesey.
Jack Nicholson was the movie’s star. But Mr. Forman – who liked to coax star performances out of lesser-known actors – did exactly that with Louise Fletcher, who won an Oscar for her portrayal of the dictatorial Nurse Ratched.
Hair and Ragtime, which came next, left less impression, but kept Mr. Forman on the list of directors whom executives were willing to trust with their more sophisticated projects. In 1978, meanwhile, Mr. Forman joined Frantisek Daniel, another Czech, as co-director of the film program at Columbia University’s school of the arts.
It was for Mr. Zaentz that Mr. Forman next struck gold, with Amadeus. The film won eight Oscars and, Mr. Forman later wrote, left him with a bittersweet – and ultimately correct – sense that his career had peaked.
Valmont, based on an 18th-century novel by Pierre Ambroise François Choderlos de Laclos, was overshadowed in 1989 by the previous year’s release of Dangerous Liaisons, a film by the director Stephen Frears, which used the same underlying material.
Mr. Forman next made a series of films that each pushed Hollywood out of its comfort zone: The People vs. Larry Flynt, which presented a sympathetic portrait of the Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt; Man on the Moon, about the comic Andy Kaufman; and Goya’s Ghosts, an examination of persecution in Spain during the lifetime of Francisco Goya.