Juraj Herz
Juraj Herz ( born September 4, 1934 in Kežmarok, Czechoslovakia; sometimes Georg Heart) is a Jewish- Slovak film director, who achieved in Germany mainly by its fairy-tale adaptations awareness.
Life and work
Heart first studied photography, puppetry later at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. After further studies in the Department of directing and acting, he began his career in the theater semaphore, where he worked as an actor and director. 1961 brought him an assistant to the Prague Barrandov Film Studios, which made his directorial debut with the short film enabled him in 1965 collected brutalities on a book by Bohumil Hrabal. Heart worked in the subsequent period in the different genres. He directed next to musicals, chamber playing and literary adaptations, especially fairy tales, which secured him international attention, such as with his third feature film The Cremator. The black comedy was elected in Australia and in Czechoslovakia the best film of the year.
Best known heart is certainly for his fairy tales and children's films to which he specialized in the 1980s and 1990s. In addition to the Director, he was mostly involved in the screenplay and took occasional small roles in his films. In 1986, he filmed the elaborate international co-production Galoshes of Fortune based on a story by Hans Christian Andersen, in which, inter alia, also ZDF and ORF involved. Since the 1990s, heart works mainly for television, but also conducts occasional theater performances in Prague theaters.