Celebrity Biographies
Jirí menzel
He belonged to the New Wave of Czech filmmakers, along with Milos Forman, Vera Chytilova and others. Internationally he is remembered above all for his debut feature, “Strictly Guarded Trains”, which won the Oscar for best foreign film. Jiri Menzel passed away at the age of 82, on September 5, 2020. “He was the bravest of the brave, and he had great courage and a great desire to live,” Olga Menzelova, his widow, said.
Born in Prague on February 23, 1938, Jiri Menzel was the son of Josef Menzel, a writer and journalist of enormous fame in his country. Although at first he considered following in his father’s professional footsteps and studying journalism, in the end he decided to enter the Film Academy in his hometown.
After several shorts, he filmed Strictly Guarded Trains , an adaptation of Bohumil Hrabal’s novel of the same name, about a young man who works at a railway station in German-occupied Czechoslovakia during World War II. In addition to winning the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, it was nominated for the Golden Globe in the same category, and for the BAFTA for Best Feature Film. After Capricious Summer , where he played a role as an actor, his third job, Larks on the Wire ,He was banned by the Soviets, who would prevent him from continuing to direct for years. “In August 1968, Russian tanks entered Czechoslovakia and all my glory was gone,” he recalled in an interview. “I was the first Czech filmmaker to be prevented from working and was only able to return to making films in 1974. It was only after a few years and several more films that I felt I had returned to a prestigious position.”
Passionate about reading, he pointed out in several interviews that he admired writers. “As a child, I was lucky to have my father’s library within my reach,” he once explained. “Back then, when I learned to read, I even read things that I couldn’t understand at that age. I loved reading, it filled me with pleasure. That there was no television at that time was a great luck for me, if I had been born later, I would have become stupid, like many young people today”.
It would make a strong comeback, at the end of the 70s and during the following years, with titles such as The Crank Men , Snip Snips , My Sweet Little Town –which again was nominated for an Oscar– , The End of Good Times or I Served the King . from England . Jiri Menzel would decide to retire from filmmaking in 2013, after Donsajni, who barely had an impact outside of the Czech Republic.