Ján Kadár | |
---|---|
Born |
János Kadár 1 April 1918 Budapest, Austria-Hungary |
Died | 1 June 1979 Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
(aged 61)
Years active | 1945–1979 |
Spouse(s) | Judita |
Awards |
NY Critics Best Foreign Film Award 1966 The Shop on Main Street Canadian Etrog 1976 Lies My Father Told Me Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film 1976 Lies My Father Told Me Oscar for Best Foreign Film 1966 The Shop on Main Street |
Ján Kadár (1 April 1918 – 1 June 1979) was a Jewish-Slovak Hungarian-born film writer and director. As a filmmaker, he worked in Slovakia, the Czech Republic, the United States, and Canada. Most of his films were directed in tandem with Elmar Klos. The two became best known for their Oscar-winning The Shop on Main Street (Obchod na korze, 1965). As a professor at the FAMU (Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts) in Prague, Kadár trained most of the directors who spawned the Czechoslovak New Wave in the 1960s.
After moving to the United States, he became professor of film direction at the American Film Institute in Beverly Hills. His personal life as well as his films encompassed and spanned a range of cultures: Jewish, Slovak, Hungarian, Czech, and American.
Kadár was born in Budapest, the Capital of the Kingdom of Hungary, a province of Austria-Hungary at that time. Before long, his parents brought him to Rožňava, Slovakia, in the newly created Czechoslovakia, where he grew up. Kadár took up the law in Bratislava after high school, but soon transferred to the first Department of Film in Czechoslovakia (probably the third such department in Europe) at the School of Industrial Arts in Bratislava in 1938 where he took classes with Slovak film's notable director Karel Plicka until the department was closed in 1939. Kadár's home town, called Rozsnyó in Hungarian then, became part of Hungary during World War II. With the application of anti-Jewish laws, Kádár was detained in a labor camp. He later said that it was for the first time in his life that he acted as a Jew: he refused conversion and served in a work unit with a yellow armband rather than a white one which was the privilege of those baptized. His parents and sister were murdered in the death camp at Auschwitz.