JIŘÍ MENZEL

(23 February 1938 - 5 September 2020)

The Czech writer, actor and film and theatre director Jiří Menzel, who has died aged 82 after a long illness following brain surgery, was instrumental in heralding the New Wave of Czech cinema in the 1960s with, among others, Milos Forman and Ivan Passer. He did it in 1966 with his first full-length feature Closely Observed Trains, a low-key comedy about an apprentice railway guard at a remote station in occupied Czechoslovakia during World War II. Far from worrying about the political implications of a German onslaught or the anti-Nazi Resistance movement, young Milos is instead desperate to lose his virginity. It’s a charming film full of sly, satirical humour, and it won Menzel an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. The director went on to make another delightful film, Capricious Summer. However, the Russians brought a temporary halt to his career when they invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 and banned his film Larks on a String, but after being released in 1990 it won the Golden Bear at Berlin. Born in Prague, Menzel had originally wanted to be an actor and throughout his career appeared in some eighty Czech films and TV movies. As a director he had worked with Vera Chytilová on Something Different and Pearls of the Deep before he directed Closely Observed Trains, based on a novel by Bohumil Hrabal with whom he often collaborated. Although he wrote and directed up to thirty titles including features, documentaries and shorts, they were seldom seen abroad. They included a version of The Beggar’s Opera, I Served the King of England, on life in an old-world Prague hotel, and The Don Juans, about an opera company rehearsing Mozart, his last film as a director (in 2013). His final work as an actor was in Martin Sulḯk’s The Interpreter which was Oscar-nominated in 2018. Jiří Menzel was married to Olga Menzelová-Kelymanová and they have two daughters, Anna Karolina and Eva Maria.

MICHAEL DARVELL