Oscar-winning Czech film director Jiri Menzel dies aged 82 after battling serious and prolonged health problems
Born on February 23, 1938, Menzel won the Academy Award for the best foreign language film with"Closely Watched Trains", a World War II drama, in 1967. Director Jiri Menzel poses during a photocall to promote the film 'I Served The King Of England" in Berlin, February 16, 2007.
Oscar-winning Czech film director Jiri Menzel has died aged 82 after battling serious health problems for a long time. "Our dear Jiri, the bravest of the brave. Your body left our mundane world in our arms last night," his wife wrote on Facebook on Sunday. Menzel won the Academy Award for the best foreign language film with "Closely Watched Trains", a World War II drama, in 1967.In the 1960s, he was one of the leading figures of the Czechoslovak New Wave of cinema, alongside another Oscar winner Milos Forman. "Closely Watched Trains", based on a novel by Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal, was Menzel's first feature film. Hrabal became an endless source of inspiration for Menzel, who shot the bitter-sweet film "Larks on a String" in 1969, depicting the life of people sidelined by the Communist regime ruling in then-Czechoslovakia and based on Hrabal's novel. He shot the film in the wake of a political meltdown known as the Prague Spring, a loosening of communist influence that was crushed by Soviet-led armies in August 1968. The film was banned by the authorities, and it only returned to the screen after Communism was toppled in the peaceful Velvet Revolution of 1989."I always admired in Hrabal the ability to look at people and see them as they truly are, with a truly uncompromising perspective, but he still loved people," Menzel said.Menzel's "Sweet Little Village" from 1985 earned him an Oscar nomination. After the Velvet Revolution, Menzel shot "The Beggar's Opera" using a screenplay by former Czech dissident playwright and later president Vaclav Havel."Good comedy should be about serious things. If you start to talk about serious things too seriously, you end up being ridiculous," Menzel once said. An occasional actor and writer and prolific theatre director, Menzel has won the French award of "Knight of Arts and Letters" – just like his muse, Bohumil Hrabal.
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