1/2 Information board about Fons Rademakers (Photo: Willem-Jan Joachems)
He was the first Dutch feature director who won an Oscar: Fons Rademakers from Roosendaal. But his birthplace seemed to forget him. Even in Italy a cultural center was named after him, but in Roosendaal there was nothing reminiscent of one of the most famous inhabitants and most important directors in our country. Now a park is bearing his name.
“He put the Dutch film on the world map. He was a real pioneer,” says Alderman Paul de Beer of Roosendaal. The alderman was allowed to make the revelation on this day, together with son Fons Rademakers Junior.
“Beautiful and honorable”, Rademakers Junior calls it. “My father always told about Roosendaal and how he grew up here. It was love at a distance, because we only came to Roosendaal once a year. Then we went to Ome Jan in the Dominestraat.”
School
Alphonse Marie Rademakers was born in that street on September 5, 1920. Fons went to ‘Het Norbertus’. High school is overlooking the park.
“It is that school where he may have developed his first ideas,” says son Fons. The memory of his father moves him. “He would have been very happy with this. And he would be proud. He was a sweet, very positive man, never a bad mood,” Fons recalls.
At the age of seventeen, Fons Senior went to the Toneelschool in Amsterdam. “He had to unlearn his Brabant accent,” says son Fons.
In the 1950s he met the big ones from the film world such as Fellini, Renoir and the Sica. And Lili Veenman, who would later become his wife.
His big moment in his career came in 1987 with the film De attack, to the book by Harry Mulisch. Rademakers won the coveted Oscar for best foreign film in front of Hollywood.
Memories
Fons Rademakers lived in Amsterdam for a long time and then in Italy with his wife Lili. He died in 2007 in Switzerland, 86 years old. Lili died at the end of May this year. She was 95 years old.
The family cherishes warm memories of Fons and Lili. Son Fons (born in 1960) traveled to Roosendaal together with his daughter Octavia (23) Nichtje Laura (19) from Amsterdam is also there. Just like cousin Bernard, with wife and son from Breda.
“I always wanted to become a cameraman,” laughs Fons Junior. “But that was not allowed by Pa. He said: if you are good, you will never be home. And if you are not good, you will not earn anything.” Fons Junior became a physicist at the CERN research laboratory in Switzerland, which searches for the building blocks of the universe.
Rademakers filmed various books and was often nominated
Fons Rademakers made a total of eleven feature films. His first was a village on the river, from 1958. That film was based on a regional novel by Antoon Coolen and was nominated for an Oscar.
One of the most famous feature films by Rademakers is Max Havelaar from 1976 with Peter Faber. The indictment to colonial oppression is ‘still relevant’, says son Fons. The last film that Fons Senior directed was The Rose Garden in 1989, with Liv Ullmann and Peter Fonda.
He is often nominated for important film prizes, including three times the Golden Palm.
There are so far five Dutch feature film directors who won an Oscar. Rademakers was the first. The first Dutchman to get an Oscar was Bert Haanstra in 1960. He didn’t get it for a feature film, but for the documentary glass.
In Roosendaal there is often complaining about the fact that nothing reminded of the famous Roosendaler. Even in the Italian hometown of Fons and Lili, the ‘Sala delle Culture was the Fons Rademakers’. Roosendalers stuck with requests, with success.
Another Oscar winner
It is remarkable that ‘the Norbertus’ received a future Oscar winner in the late 1980s. Cameraman Hoyte van Hoytema received the Oscar for Oppenheimer in 2023.
There is a well-known TV maker who was there: Jef Rademakers, from the Pinup Club and classmates. “Far family,” laughs Fons Junior. “Dad sometimes told you about grandfather who had thirteen brothers, something like that.”
