A master of ironic comedy and sumptuous period dramas, film director Milos Forman (born 1932) has won two Academy Awards for directing the year's best pictures in 1975 and 1984. His works show a humanist empathy for people as victims of cruel systems over which they have little control.

Milos Forman was born on February 18, 1932 in Caslav, Czechoslovakia. His father, Rudolf, was a Jewish professor of education, while his mother, Ann Svabova, was a Protestant. Forman's parents introduced him to the cinema when he was a young boy, and he fell in love with American classics such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and the westerns of John Ford. Forman was orphaned at the age of nine, when his parents died in Nazi concentration camps. His older brother Pavel, hunted by the Nazi secret police, took a job designing stage sets for a theater troupe that staged operettas. His brother...