Mihály Fekete

Biography

Mihály Fekete stepped onto the stage first, then slipped behind it to pull the strings, and finally stepped into the frame when film was still young. In 1913, the year the world’s movie palaces were learning how to dream aloud, he faced a camera for the first time and quickly became Jenő Janovics’s go-to leading man, anchoring one Transylvanian hit after another. When war and borders rearranged the map, Fekete stayed in motion: he penned plays, chronicled the history of Temesvár’s theatre in a monograph, and in 1919 wandered village to village gathering memories for his memoir, Faluról falura. Soon the director’s chair called him home; he took the helm of the Transylvanian company and steered it through shifting political winds. Recognition arrived in the form of the Romanian People’s Republic’s Merited Artist title, a medal for a life spent telling stories on every available surface—boards, pages, celluloid.