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When Miloš Forman, who has died aged 86, travelled to Prague to shoot the film Amadeus in 1984, it was the first time he had set foot in his homeland for 16 years. He had fled communist Czechoslovakia in 1968 just before the Russians put an end to the Prague Spring.

In the US, when he was offered One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975), set in a state psychiatric hospital, he saw it as a metaphor for the conformist society from which he had escaped. Forman identified with McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), the grinning antihero fighting the system as represented by Nurse Ratched, played with chilling authority by Louise Fletcher. McMurphy is finally lobotomised after attempting to throttle the nurse, who signified the way totalitarian regimes exact revenge on transgressors. It was something Forman knew about personally, having lived under nazism and Stalinism. The picture, made at a cost of $3m, earned more than $50m. It was also the first movie since It Happened One Night (1934) to win all five top Oscars: best picture, best actor (Nicholson), best actress (Fletcher), best director and best screenplay adaptation. It was an especially sweet triumph for Forman, who had been struggling to get work when One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest came along.

Born in Čáslav, near Prague, Forman was eight when his father, Rudolf Forman, a professor, and mother, Anna Švábová, a hotelier, died in Nazi concentration camps. He was brought up by two uncles and friends of his parents, and it was much later that he discovered that his biological father was a Jewish architect, Otto Kohn.

In 1950, aged 18, he enrolled in the newly founded Prague film school, Famu, and began directing documentaries for Czech television four years later. In 1963, Forman made two short films, one on a talent contest, and the other on a band competition, which revealed his keen eye for the minutiae of human behaviour and a taste for gently mocking simple pleasures. After these shorts, in which he gave documentary material fictional form, his first feature, Peter and Pavla (AKA Black Peter, 1964), gave his fictional material documentary form. By using mostly non-actors, improvised dialogue and filming in the streets, Forman brought a new vitality into Czech cinema. As sharply observed and satirically affectionate was A Blonde in Love (AKA Loves of a Blonde, 1965). It told of a shy romantic factory girl in a small town depleted of men, who falls in love with a visiting young pianist, but is made unwelcome by his parents when she pursues him to Prague. One of the most delightful sequences shows a group of middle-aged army reservists trying to pair off with some of the bored local girls at a dance.

Forman's films, and others of the Czech new wave, introduced to the cinema portrayals of working-class life untainted by the formulae of socialist realism. Though fiercely attacked by Stalinist reviewers initially, the more liberal faction of the Communist party, then in ascendancy, appropriated these movies as expressions of the new concept of "socialist" art.

People were more wickedly satirised by Forman in The Firemen's Ball (1967). A beauty contest fizzles out when the contestants refuse to leave the cloakrooms, the raffle prizes are stolen, someone has a heart attack and a house burns down. The film, which took some sideswipes at petty bureaucracy, brought the director into disfavour with the authorities and caused 40,000 Czech firemen to resign in protest until it was explained that the picture was merely allegorical. Following the Soviet invasion of 1968, The Firemen's Ball was listed as one of four Czech films to be banned "forever". It was the last Forman made there before he left for the US.

Taking Off (1971), in which he cast his sardonic eye on American middle-class families, failed commercially. In 1972, he directed The Little Black Book, a play by his friend Jean-Claude Carrière, on Broadway. It ran for seven nights. Then, the US immigration service, acting on a complaint from the Directors Guild of America, nearly prevented him from working. Fortunately, Sidney Lumet, Paddy Chayefsky, Mike Nichols and Buck Henry successfully pleaded his case. 

With this threat of expulsion hanging over him, Forman was approached by the producers Saul Zaentz and Michael Douglas to direct One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. "Of course I said yes," Forman said. "I loved the novel [Ken Kesey's counterculture classic] from the start and thought it would make a wonderful movie. This showed me that it's much more comfortable to slip into a state of acute depression in America than back home."

Skilfully shifting from gentle comedy to farce to tragedy, the film perfectly demonstrated Forman's special talent in dealing with conflicts between different sets of people, each of whom is well intentioned but who clash because their ideas and methods are at odds.

After making this hymn to nonconformity, Forman seemed a logical choice to direct Hair (1979), the film version of the hit 1967 stage musical. But the age of Aquarius seemed long over, and its flower power paraphernalia had withered and died. Detached from the relevance, urgency and joyful liberation the original reflected, the film offered no more than vigorous dancing through the streets and parks of New York, some uninhibited playing by young performers and a touch of nostalgia for the over 25s.

Much of Forman's special talent was submerged when tackling "big" subjects in Ragtime (1981), an impressive but not altogether coherent survey of America at the beginning of the 20th century, based on the EL Doctorow bestseller. The film was a box-office failure.

Forman bounced back with Amadeus. Having seen Peter Shaffer's 1979 play about the rivalry between Mozart, a musical genius but childish buffoon, and Antonio Salieri, the far less talented court composer, at its first London premiere, Forman informed the playwright, through their mutual agent, that he wanted to film it.

While sticking very close to the original, the film became a sumptuous spectacle powered by Mozart's music, and enabled lavish and authentic recreations of the operas. It also had an uninhibited, giggling performance from Tom Hulce in the title role, and F Murray Abraham as the dignified but malevolent Salieri. Amadeus even bettered Forman's earlier Oscar haul by winning best picture, best actor (Abraham), best director, best screenplay adaptation, best art direction, best sound, best costume and best makeup.

Remaining in the 18th century, Forman embarked on a screen adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, only to discover that Stephen Frears was doing the same thing. "We were in the middle of our script already when they announced their version, based on the play," Forman recalled. "Of course we immediately learned they were rushing into it very fast. With the concept I had, we all knew I couldn't be faster. We couldn't beat them. So, I was expecting a call from the producers saying, 'Sorry, Miloš, we can't take the risk.' The call came. They asked me, 'Does it really bother you that another film is going to be made?' I said of course not. And I felt like, God, Hollywood is still crazy. That's good."

Although, at the time, Forman's Valmont (1989) suffered from unfavourable comparisons with Frears' Dangerous Liaisons (1988), his film (less faithful to Choderlos de Laclos' epistolatory novel), with a much younger, less known cast, was more interested in the seduction itself than the art of seduction, and is the more heartfelt.

Forman's The People vs Larry Flynt (1996) sits with One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus and the later Man on the Moon (1999) in being about inspired misfits. This told of America's most notorious and successful pornographer who ran a series of strip clubs and the raunchy Hustler magazine. What concerned Forman most was the notion that freedom of speech encompasses the right to offend and must apply to unpopular beliefs. Man on the Moon was about the comedian Andy Kaufman (played by Jim Carrey), who was first lauded and then dumped by the TV networks.

It was seven years before Forman directed another feature, during which time he carried out his duties as professor of film at Columbia University, New York, and tried to get various projects off the ground.

Goya's Ghosts (2006), about the Spanish inquisition, had some topical parallels with religious intolerance, fanaticism, torture, occupation and war, with the cast speaking English in a range of different accents.

Forman, who became an American citizen in 1975, was twice divorced. He is survived by his third wife, Martina Zbořilová, whom he married in 1999, and their twin sons, James and Andrew, and by twin sons, Petr and Matej, from his second marriage, to Věra Kŕesadlová.

• Miloš Forman (Jan Tomáš Forman), film director, born 18 February 1932; died 13 April 2018

Ronald BERGAN
first published in:
www.theguardian.com/film/2018/apr/15/milos-forman-obituary