Amadeus

Czech-American director Miloš Forman’s film Amadeus (1984) received eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor in a Leading Role, Best Makeup, and Best Costume Design. The motion picture also won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, adapting British playwright Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play Amadeus. The story of Amadeus is inspired by the 1897 opera called Mozart and Salieri by Russian composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, an adaptation itself of the 1830 play of the same name by the great Russian author Alexander Pushkin. The story of mutual cultural inspiration is a fictionalized account of the relationship between the classical composers Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The Czech Republic’s capital of Prague provided much of the backdrop for the filming of the film Amadeus and, appropriately so, as Mozart famously stated “My Prague people understand me.”
Photo courtesy of Jaromír Komárek