Theodor Pistek, a racecar driver, painter and costume designer who won an Academy Award for his lavish work on the 1984 Mozart biopic “Amadeus,” died on Dec. 3 at his home in Mukarov, a village in the Czech Republic. He was 93.
His death was confirmed by his son Jan Pistek.
Descended from actors, a renowned artist and one of the first sales representatives in Europe for Ford automobiles, Mr. Pistek zoomed through his various professions the way he spun his Saab 96 around racetracks.
“He who wins,” he once said, “is the one who can brake last before the turn and is in full control.”
As an artist, Mr. Pistek painted hundreds of hyperrealistic works, many depicting racecar drivers and the engineering marvels they operated. He was especially fond of radiators; he hunted for them in junkyards, then cracked them open with a hacksaw, dismantled them and used their parts in metal reliefs.
“I was driven mad by the need to see what was inside,” he is quoted as saying in “Theodor Pistek: Man and Machine” (2017), by the journalist Petr Volf. “When I uncovered their texture, I experienced amazing moments. I convinced myself that, under certain circumstances, everything is capable of living a completely different life with a different meaning and purpose.”
As a costume designer, Mr. Pistek worked on more than 100 films, including three directed by his friend Milos Forman: “Amadeus,” “Valmont” (1989) and “The People vs. Larry Flynt” (1996). The two met during their mandatory military service in Communist Czechoslovakia.
When Communism fell in the late 1980s, the country’s new president, the dissident writer Vaclav Havel, commissioned Mr. Pistek to design new uniforms for the Prague Castle Guard.
“We cannot change history in baggy khakis with a red star on the cap,” Mr. Havel told Mr. Pistek. “I want people to see the change — that we are at a beginning.”
Mr. Pistek created stately blue wool coats adorned with tassels in red, white and blue — the colors of the Czech national flag. He also redesigned the huts the guards stood in and even the tint on their bayonets.
“Thus was born one of Prague’s prime tourist attractions: the noontime changing of the guard at the main gate and first courtyard of Prague Castle,” the journalist Alan Levy wrote, adding that the new uniforms were opulent enough “to make British redcoats look like combat fatigues.”
In Mr. Pistek’s hierarchy of his vocations, though, painting was at the top.
“A painter is a free man in his creation,” he told The Washington Post in 1985. “He expresses what he wants — it is his idea and his responsibility.”
Racing cars provided a respite from making art. “Through this form of concentration, I could balance out the mental pressure of 14 days of intensive work in the studio,” he said in Mr. Volf’s book. “After that, taking a seat in a fast car, where everything plays out in the blink of an eye between you and the car — that was my drug.”
Costume design merely paid the bills.
“I want not to do costume design,” he said after winning the Oscar. “It takes time away from the paintings.”
Yet it was painting, in part, that made him so gifted as a designer. His creamy white coats with intricate floral motifs and other elaborate creations for “Amadeus” drew on works he admired by 18th-century artists like Fragonard and Watteau.
“As a painter, he understood the edges of the frame,” Deborah Nadoolman Landis, who designed the costumes for “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and other films, said in an interview. “He understood depth of field. He understood how to paint an idea into real life.”
In addition to his win for “Amadeus,” Mr. Pistek received an Oscar nomination for another set of 18th-century costumes, those of the French aristocrats in “Valmont,” Mr. Forman’s adaptation of the 1782 Choderlos de Laclos novel “Dangerous Liaisons.”
Theodor Pistek was born on Oct. 25, 1932, in Prague. His father, also named Theodor Pistek, and his mother, Marie Zeniskova, were actors in Czech cinema.
Growing up, he loved cars, which he learned about from his grandfather, who sold Fords and owned a racecar.
“One of my first memories is of looking at the cars from the window,” he said in Mr. Volf’s book. “It wasn’t like today. There was one only every 10 minutes. And when some cool car stopped on the street, I dashed down the stairs in order to check it out.”
Mr. Pistek believed he had an innate talent for painting inherited from his great-great-grandfather, Frantisek Zenisek, whose works are in the collection of the National Gallery Prague. In 1952, Mr. Pistek enrolled at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague, where he studied painting, graduating in 1958.
Around that time, Mr. Pistek met the filmmaker Frantisek Vlacil, who hired him to work on “The White Dove” (1960). Their collaboration continued through the 1960s with the acclaimed medieval period films “Marketa Lazarova” and “The Valley of the Bees.”
Before long, Mr. Pistek was juggling several lives. To his fellow racecar drivers, he “became a curiosity on the circuit,” he said.
In addition to his son Jan, Mr. Pistek is survived by another son, Martin; a granddaughter; and two great-grandchildren. His wife, Vera, predeceased him.
“Amadeus” was undoubtedly Mr. Pistek’s claim to international fame. In recreating Mozart’s world, he inspired a fashion mini-trend in the 1980s.
Not long after the Oscars, he attended the British designer Danny Noble’s show in New York. With Mozart playing in the background, the models strutted out wearing patterned vests, riding jackets, trumpet skirts and white wigs.
“I saw your film,” Mr. Noble told Mr. Pistek, “and suddenly I realized this was the right spirit for the clothes. Things were getting rather foppish and dandy, and the Mozart things seemed just right.”
Soon, it seemed as if Mr. Pistek was living on the set of “Amadeus.”
“I felt like I was meeting people wearing my costumes outside when I went for a walk,” he told Vice in 2012, adding: “I couldn’t believe my eyes when I met a guy on the street in white stockings and a frill.”
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