JIRI MENZEL, the Czech director who won the foreign-language film Oscar for 1966’s “Closely Watched Trains,” has died. He was 82.

Menzel’s wife, Olga Menzelova, posted the news on Instagram and Facebook on Sunday. She said that Menzel had died at home on Saturday. A cause of death was not given. Menzel was “the bravest among the brave,” she wrote, while commending his “courage, with [his] appetite and [his] will to live.”

A member of the Czech New Wave school of filmmakers alongside Milos Forman, Vera Chytilova and others, “Closely Watched Trains” was Menzel’s feature directorial debut (he had previously acted in films and directed student and short films).

“Closely Watched Trains,” based on a 1965 novel by Bohumil Hrabal, follows a train station guard who falls in love with a conductor amid World War II. Menzel played the film’s doctor, Dr. Brabec.

In an interview in 2007 with the Associated Press, Menzel noted that his career took a nosedive after vaulting to success with his Oscar win due to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia: In August 1968, “Soviet tanks entered Czechoslovakia and all my glory was gone. I was the first Czech filmmaker prevented from working and was only able to return to filmmaking in 1974. It was only after some years and several more films that I felt I had returned to a position of prestige.”

His prestige would indeed return in full force. Menzel would go on to make over 20 other films, including 1969’s satire “Larks on a String,” which was initially censored by the Czech government but eventually released in 1990, when it won the top prize at the Berlin Film Festival. Menzel was again nominated for the foreign-language Oscar in 1987 for “My Sweet Little Village.”

Menzel received the Telluride Film Festival’s Silver Medallion Prize in 1986 for his career achievements, served on the juries of the Shanghai Film Festival, the Venice Film Festival and the Moscow International Film Festival and won a Toronto International Film Festival award for lifetime achievement in 2013.

Menzel is survived by his wife and two daughters, Anna Karolina and Eva Maria.

(SD-Agencies)