Liviu Ciulei stands out among Romanian theater directors as, starting from the late 1950s and the early 1960s, he managed to take the Romanian theater away from the rigid and unnatural commandments of the socialist realism. Equally a film director, Ciulei brought back the aesthetic dimension in cinematography and theater, something that was also due to his intellectual training in the interwar period. He was born in July 1923 in Bucharest, into an old family of intellectuals. His father, whose name was also Liviu Ciulley, was a renowned constructor, a collaborator of the main architects who built modern Bucharest. Moreover, in order to respect his father s wish, Liviu Ciulei first attended the Faculty of Architecture, then the Conservatory of Dramatic Art. On stage, he initially stood out as an actor, with both his talent as a performer and that of an architect being useful in his career, because Ciulei also performed roles in his films and made the stage design for many of his theatri