Zoltán Fábri

Biography

He was born with the surname Furtkovits. The name Fábri came later, when he was already working in the theatre.

Zoltán was born on 15 October 1917 in Budapest, the son of Mihály Béla Furtkovits and Olga Mária Gröber, and grew up in the Ferencváros district. He prepared to become a painter and in 1938 graduated from the College of Fine Arts. By then his interest had already shifted towards the stage: in 1941 he graduated from the Academy of Theatre and Film Arts. While still a second-year student he became a scholarship trainee director at the Vígszínház theatre. In 1941–1943 Fábri worked at the National Theatre as an actor, stage designer and assistant director. From 1943 to 1946 he was at the Vígszínház, from 1946 to 1948 at the Művész Theatre, in the 1948 season he was a director at the National Theatre, and in 1949 he ran the Pioneer Theatre for one season. For a man who had meant to paint, it was a rather winding route, but his training as a painter did not vanish from his work. He was known as a perfectionist: months before shooting began he drew and planned every scene down to the smallest detail, and he improvised nothing.

In 1950 Fábri joined the Hunnia film studio, where until 1952 he was artistic director and then a director. In 1952 he worked as production designer on the film “Erkel”. His first film, “Storm”, came out in 1951–1952 (the exact year is given differently). Besides “Storm”, his early work includes “Fourteen Lives Saved” (1954). His real fame came with “Merry-Go-Round”, released in 1955–1956: the film made him a director noticed beyond Hungary.

Almost all of Fábri’s films are based on novels and short stories, and he wrote the screenplays himself. He adapted Ferenc Molnár, Dezső Kosztolányi, Frigyes Karinthy, Tibor Déry, Ferenc Sánta, István Örkény, András Bódor and Margit Kaffka. Many of the films are about the Second World War or are set against it. His regular collaborators were the actress Mari Törőcsik and the cinematographer György Illés. In the 1960s he experimented for a time with narrative construction and flashbacks (“Darkness in Daytime”, “Twenty Hours”), and “The Fifth Seal” (1976) has some strongly surreal scenes. But he generally did not embrace modernist devices, and that, to my mind, explains why János Kádár’s government treated him better than Miklós Jancsó.

For “Twenty Hours” he won the top prize at the 1965 Moscow Film Festival, shared with “War and Peace”, and the Unicrit Award in Venice. “Darkness in Daytime” received a special prize at Locarno in 1964. “The Boys of Paul Street” (1969) and “Hungarians” (1978) were nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. For “141 Minutes from the Unfinished Sentence” he was given a special prize at the Moscow festival in 1975, for “The Fifth Seal” the top prize there in 1977, and in 1979 he received the festival’s honorary prize for his contribution to cinema. “Requiem” brought him the Silver Bear at the 1982 Berlin festival. Three times, in 1953, 1955 and 1970, he was awarded the Kossuth Prize.

For many years he headed the Hungarian Film Artists’ Union: by one account from 1958 to 1981, by others from 1959 or 1965. In 1969 he acted in a film once, playing the minister Zoltán Dániel in Péter Bacsó’s satire “The Witness”.

From 1970 Fábri taught at the Academy of Theatre and Film Arts in Budapest. He kept directing until the early 1980s, his last film being “Come to My Name Day!” (1983). In his last years he wrote screenplays that were never produced, and he painted.

Fábri died in Budapest on 23 August 1994. In 2014 his grandson, also named Péter Fábri, opened a digital archive of the director’s papers. In 2017 the studios of the National Film Institute on Róna Street were named after him.