The Directors Guild of America has selected Milos Forman as the recipient of its lifetime achievement award for distinguished achievement in motion picture direction.
The kudo will be presented at the 65th annual DGA Awards on Feb. 2 at Hollywood & Highland.
Forman’s credits include “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” “Hair,” “Ragtime,” “Amadeus,” “Valmont,” “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” “Man in the Moon” and “Goya’s Ghosts.”
“I’m thrilled and touched — especially when I see the other names who have received the award,” Forman told Variety.
“No matter what subject or genre he tackles, Milos finds the universality of the human experience in every story, allowing us — his rapt audience — to recognize ourselves within the struggle for free expression and self-determination that Milos so aptly portrays on the silver screen,” said DGA president Taylor Hackford.
Forman is the 34th recipient of the DGA’s lifetime achievement nod. Norman Jewison was the most recent winner; other recipients include Cecil B. DeMille (1953), Frank Capra (1959), Alfred Hitchcock (1968), Orson Welles (1984), Billy Wilder (1985), Akira Kurosawa (1992), Stanley Kubrick (1997), Francis Ford Coppola (1998), Steven Spielberg (2000), Martin Scorsese (2003) and Clint Eastwood (2006).
Forman won the Oscar and DGA Award for “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” and “Amadeus.” He also received an Oscar nod for “The People vs. Larry Flynt.” “My films were all satisfying in different ways but the most important was ‘Taking Off,’ which was my first American film,” Forman noted. “That changed everything.”
He joined the DGA in 1970 and served two terms on the national board. Forman was awarded the John Huston Award for Artists Rights in 1997 and the DGA Honor in 2008.
