Liviu Ciulei (Romanian pronunciation:[ˈlivjutʃjuˈlej]; 7 July 1923 – 24 October 2011[1]) was a Romanian theater and film director, film writer, actor, architect, educator, costume and set designer.[2] During a career spanning over 50 years, he was described by Newsweek as "one of the boldest and most challenging figures on the international scene".[3]
Ciulei was the artistic director of Teatrul Bulandra for more than a decade. During his tenure at the Bulandra he staged a wide range of classics. His Shakespeare productions include "As You Like it" "Macbeth" and "The Tempest", which was awarded Romania's Critics' Prize for Best Production of 1979. Also at the Bulandra, he staged such European classics as Maxim Gorky's "The Lower Depths" and "The Children of the Sun", Georg Büchner's "Danton's Death" and "Leonce and Lena", and Bertolt Brecht's "Threepenny Opera". His productions of American classics include Tennessee Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire", William Saroyan's "The Time of Your Life", and Eugene O'Neill's "Long Day Journey into Night". Ciulei was a guest director in many theaters around the world: in West Berlin, Paris, Göttingen, Düsseldorf, Munich, and Vancouver. In Sydney, he won the 1977 Australian Critics'Award for his production of "The Lower Depths". In 1974 he made his American debut at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., as director and designer with "Leonce and Lena". In 1980 he directed and created sets for Dmitri Shostakovich's opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" at the Spoleto Festival in Italy: and in May 1982, he redirected the same opera for the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Between 1980 and 1985, he was the artistic director of the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. At the Guthrie he directed "The Tempest", "Eve of Retirement", "As You Like it", "Requiem for a Nun", "Peer Gynt", "The Threepenny Opera", "Three Sisters", "Twelfth Night", and "A Midsummer Night's Dream", among others.
After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, back in his native Romania, Ciulei directed a series of stage productions that were both publicly and critically acclaimed. He was named Honorary Director of the theater he has always loved the most, Bulandra. Besides being the costume and set designer of the majority of his own productions, Ciulei, as an architect, contributed to the rebuilding of the auditorium of the Bulandra Theatre.
Family
He was first married to actress Clody Bertola [ro],[9] and then to scenographer Ioana Gărdescu. He remarried, to German journalist Helga Reiter, whose son from a previous marriage (Thomas Ciulei, now a film director) he adopted.[10]
Death
Ciulei died on 24 October 2011 in a hospital in Munich, aged 88; he had been suffering from multiple illnesses. His body was cremated, and the subject was brought up in television debates regarding Sergiu Nicolaescu's cremation in 2013 as to how the act of cremation is not sanctioned by the Romanian Orthodox Church.
^Richard Taylor, Nancy Wood, Julian Graffy, Dina Iordanova (2019). The BFI Companion to Eastern European and Russian Cinema. Bloomsbury. pp. 1970–1971. ISBN978-1838718497.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
