Born in Bucharest to Liviu Ciulley , a lawyer and constructor, Ciulei studied architecture and theater at the Royal Conservatory of Music and Theatre. He made his theater debut in 1946, as Puck in an Odeon Theatre production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Soon after, he joined the theater company known as Teatrul Municipal din Bucureşti, later renamed Teatrul Bulandra, and directed his first stage production in 1957 – The Rainmaker. In 1961, Ciulei gained an overall recognition for his version of Shakespeare's As You Like It. In the same year, he was a member of the jury at the 2nd Moscow International Film Festival. He was the recipient of the Directors' Award at the 1965 Cannes Film Festival for The Forest of the Hanged, the film version of the Liviu Rebreanu's eponymous novel. In the 1980s, he was marginalized by the regime and transferred to work at Sahia film studio, as documentary filmmaker. Ciulei was the artistic director of Teatrul Bulandra for more than a decade. During his tenure at the Bulandra he staged a wide range of classics. His Shakespeare productions include "As You Like it" "Macbeth" and "The Tempest", which was awarded Romania's Critics' Prize for Best Production of 1979. Also at the Bulandra, he staged such European classics as Gorki's "The Lower Depths" and "The Children of the Sun", Buchner's "Danton's Death" and "Leonce and Lena", and Brecht's "Threepenny Opera". His productions of American classics include Williams' "A Streetcar Named Desire", Saroyan's "The Time of Your Life", and O'Neill's "Long Day Journey into Night". Ciulei was a guest director in many theaters around the world: in West Berlin, Paris, Göttingen, Düsseldorf, Munich and Vancouver. In Sydney, he won the 1977 Australian Critics'Award for his production of "The Lower Depths". In 1974 he made his American debut at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., as director and designer with "Leonce and Lena". In 1980 he directed and created sets for the Shostakovich opera "Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk" at the Spoleto Festival in Italy: and in May 1982, he redirected the same opera for the Lyric Opera in Chicago. Between 1980–85, he was the artistic director of Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota. At the Guthrie he directed "The Tempest", "Eve of Retirement", "As You Like it", "Requiem for a Nun", "Peer Gynt", "The Threepenny Opera", "Three Sisters", "Twelfth Night", and "A Midsummer Night's Dream", among others. From 1986–1990, Liviu Ciulei taught theater direction at Columbia University in the City of New York in the MFA program in theatre arts. Later, NYU made him a richer offer to teach graduate acting, and he accepted an appointment at the university from 1991–1995. After the Romanian Revolution of 1989, back in his native Romania, Ciulei directed a series of stage productions that have been both publicly and critically acclaimed. He was named Honorary Director of the theater he has always loved the most, Bulandra. Besides being the costume and set designer of the majority of his own productions, Ciulei, as an architect, contributed to the rebuilding of the auditorium of Bulandra Theatre.
Family
He was first married to actress Clody Bertola. He remarried, to journalist Helga Reiter-Ciulei. His son by the second marriage is film director Thomas Ciulei.
Death
Ciulei died on 24 October 2011 in a hospital in Munich, aged 88; he had been suffering from multiple illnesses; his body was cremated and the subject was brought up in television debates regarding Sergiu Nicolaescu's cremation in 2013 as to how the act of cremation is not sanctioned by the Romanian Orthodox Church.
