Prague (AFP)

Oscar-winning Czech director Jiri Menzel, who had long suffered serious health problems, has died aged 82, his wife Olga Menzelova announced on Sunday.

"Our dear Jiri, that brave of the brave. Your body left our trivial world in our arms last night," she wrote on Facebook.

Figure of the "New Czechoslovakian wave" carrier of freedom and protest against the communist regime, the filmmaker, born February 23, 1938, was also an actor, screenwriter and theater director.

He won the Oscar for best foreign film in 1967 for his first feature film, "Closely Watched Trains", a drama set against the backdrop of World War II.

Around fifteen feature films followed, generally acclaimed by critics.

Like Milos Forman and Vera Chytilova, he was trained at the Prague Film School, from which he graduated in 1962, by the great filmmaker Otakar Vavra, who inspired the New Wave in his country.

"I am grateful to him for everything he taught me, and there is a lot," said Jiri Menzel in 2011, shortly after the 100th birthday of his teacher.

"Closely Watched Trains" was taken from a novel by Czechoslovak writer Bohumil Hrabal, which went on to become a limitless source of inspiration for Mr. Menzel.

"Alouettes, le fil à la patte", adapted in 1969 by the same author, was a bittersweet evocation of the lives of people marginalized by the Communist regime.

Mr. Menzel had shot the film in the wake of the Prague Spring, a popular protest against Communism crushed by Soviet tanks in August 1968.

The feature film had been banned in Czechoslovakia, and could not be shown in theaters until after the fall of the communist dictatorship during the Velvet Revolution in 1989.

He won the Golden Bear at the Berlin International Film Festival in 1990.

"I have always admired in Hrabal his ability to observe people and see them as they really are, with a truly uncompromising perspective, but he loved them nonetheless", explained the filmmaker.

Among his other films based on Bohumil Hrabal's books are "An Exhilarating Blonde" (1981) and "The Snowdrop Festivities" (1984).

"My dear little village", released in 1985, was again nominated for the Oscars.

After the end of communism, Mr. Menzel shot "L'opéra du beg" in 1991, based on a screenplay by former dissident, playwright and ex-Czech president Vaclav Havel.

He had shot his last film inspired by Mr. Hrabal in 2006, "I who served the King of England".

“A good comedy should be about serious stuff. If you start to take serious stuff too seriously, you end up being ridiculous,” he once said.

Occasionally actor and writer, prolific theater director, Jiri Menzel had been made "Chevalier des arts et des lettres" by France - like his muse, Bohumil Hrabal.

© 2020 AFP