Czech Oscar-nominated cinematographer Miroslav Ondricek dies

Ondricek is famous in the Czech Republic and abroad primarily for his cooperation with Forman in Czechoslovakia and in the United States. Both film-makers are leading personalities of the Czech New Film Wave of the 1960s.

Ondricek has been nominated for Oscar for cinematography twice, but he has never won the award. First, it was in 1981 for Forman's Ragtime and three years later for Amadeus, directed by Forman as well, which won Oscar in eight categories.

In 2004, Ondricek received the International Achievement Award of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC) in Los Angeles.

Ondricek has worked on about forty feature films of various genres, over a dozen of which were shot in the USA, during his fifty-year career.

Karlovy Vary International Filmy Festival and actor Jiri Bartoska called Ondricek's death "a sad departure of a great cameraman."

Oscar-nominated director Jan Hrebejk said he considered Ondricek one of the most significant personalities of the Czech cinema who had made excellent film as well as a great man who deserved both love and admiration.

"This is a serious loss, a representative of the most famous era of the Czechoslovak film of the late 1960s has left," said former Czech TV director Ivo Mathe, who worked with Ondricek in the Czech Film and Television Academy (CFTA). Ondricek was its president.

After graduating from the Film Academy of Performing Arts (FAMU) in Prague, Ondricek shot documentaries and made regular newsreels for the cinema. Later he worked in the Barrandov film studios in Prague where he met Forman.

Together with him, he shot his first black-and-white film Konkurs (Competition) in 1963, followed by Lasky jedne plavovlasky (The Loves of a Blonde) in 1965 and Hori, ma panenko (The Firemen's Ball) in 1967, which was later banned by the communist regime.

Later on, Ondricek cooperated with a leading director of the British Free Cinema, Lindsay Anderson, on The White Bus in 1967 and If... in 1968 and finally on O Lucky Man! (1972).

Ondricek joined Forman, who emigrated after the Soviet occupation of then Czechoslovakia in 1968, in New York in 1970 where he later made Slaughterhouse-Five with George Roy Hill. and the adaptation of John Irving's novel The World According to Garp (1982), directed by Hill as well. In 1983, Ondricek collaborated with Mike Nichols on the film Silkwood with Meryl Streep.

In the 1990s, he cooperated with U.S. director Penny Mashall on Awakenings (1990) with Robert de Niro and a comedy on the woman's baseball league during World War Two, A League of Their Own (1992), in which pop-singer Madonna played.

Written by: ČTK
www.ctk.cz