The directors: No 9: Milos Forman

Milos Forman was born Jan Tomås Forman in, what is now, the Czech Republic in 1932. His father was Jewish, his mother a gentile - and both died in Auschwitz when Milos was still a young boy. He survived the war and went on to study screenwriting at the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.

He later managed to avoid the Russian invasion, following the Prague Spring of 1968, by being, at the time, in Paris negotiating the production of his first US film. This led to him moving permanently to the US, where he became professor of film at Columbia University.

Mr Forman's most successful early US movie was the Academy Award-winning adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1975. This actually netted five Oscars, including one for Mr Forman for best director.

Four years later he, rather surprisingly, directed a screen version of the seminal rock-opera Hair. But it's fair to say that this was one of his less successful ventures.

Back on form in 1984, Milos Forman scored a considerable artistic success with his direction of Peter Shaffer's screen adaptation of his own stage play Amadeus. He won his second best director Oscar for this feature. It is interesting to note that Mr Forman has directed no fewer than eight actors who have been nominated for Academy Awards. Indeed, he has often been described as a director who is extremely sensitive to all of his actors' requirements.

He has married three times and sired twin sons, who have followed him into the film industry as actors. And he is, at the age of 76, still very active in the film industry.