OLGA

Olga Havlová

The hero of our film. Her husband said about her: “In Olga, I found exactly what I needed: someone who could respond to my own mental instability, offer sober criticism of my wilder ideas, provide private support for my public adventures.” And for all that, she still managed to be herself in a way that it makes it impossible to forget her right up to today.

Václav Havel

Husband of Olga Havlová.

Olga Pešková

Daughter of Olga’s sister Jaroslava, i.e. Olga’s niece. But as she herself confesses in the film, she never called her “Auntie”. To her as everyone else, she was simply “Olga”. In the film, Olga Pešková reads excerpts from interviews with Olga Havlová.

Jarmila Bělíková

Charter 77 signatory and cofounder of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted. Bělíková graduated in psychology, and worked in a psychiatric hospital with alcoholics. After signing the Charter, she ended up as a cleaner. After 1990, she avoided the temptation of politics and found her way back to the practice of psychology. She died in 2010.

Kateřina Blažková-Bajzíková

Bajzíková was one of the circle of friends round Olga Havlová, and involved in the fancy dress parties celebrating Olga’s birthdays. Before 1989, she worked in puppet theatre; afterwards, in the personal secretariat of President Václav Havel. She was also a photographer and partner of the photographer Jaroslav Kukal (†1990).

Zbyněk Benýšek

Painter, and author of prose and poetry. With the onset of “normalisation” after the Soviet occupation, he left university in Brno and went to Prague where he lived in hostels and lodging houses, worked as a labourer in the Metro, and as a props man and designer in the theatre. He wrote without expectation of publication, became involved in samizdat literature, and launched himself as a singer. He was one of the first to sign Charter 77 – 6 January 1977. In the 1980s, after brutal interrogations at the hands of the secret police, he decided to go into exile. He returned to Prague in 1992. He belonged to Olga Havlová’s circle of friends.

Vratislav Brabenec

Member of the Plastic People of the Universe, lyric writer – for the albums Co znamená vésti koně (Leading horses) and Maska za maskou (The mask behind the mask) in particular. Also an émigré, a garden architect and a repatriate. Brabenec plays the alto saxophone, bass clarinet and clarinet, and sings. As Ondřej Bezr wrote about him: “Something between an Old Testament prophet and a washed-up rocker.”

Anna Freimanová

Freimanová began as a librarian and still works in a library today. However, in between she has been assistant director in the Theatre on the Balustrades, an employee of the theatre department of the National Museum and a samizdat editor, as well as secretary to the President of the Republic and chief editor of the press department of Czech Television. Today she is publications editor for the Václav Havel Library.

Jane Fondová

American actress and double Oscar winner, writer, political activist, model, trainer and producer. She was famous in the 1960s for her roles in films like Barbarella and Cat Ballou. Daughter of the actor Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda is of aristocratic origin on her mother Frances’s side. She is named after the celebrated Jane Seymour, third wife of Henry VIII.

Ivan M. Havel

Václav Havel’s brother and former director of the Centre for Theoretical Studies of the Charles University. In 1971 he was awarded a doctorate by the University of Berkeley in California. Involved in cybernetics, artificial intelligence, robotics, cognitive sciences, and issues of philosophy connected with these fields. Ivan Havel is also observer of his wife, a successful entrepreneur and manager of her own organic farm.

Vladimír Hanzel

Tram driver, cleaner at the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the Czech Technical University, sales assistant in the National Museum, computer programmer, mathematician-analyst, music journalist and critic, private secretary to the President of the Republic and director of the Secretariat of the President of the Republic, chief director of the Cabinet of the Minister of Education, director of the Educational and Cultural Centre of the Jewish Museum in Prague, author of Zrychlený tep dějin (The Accelerated Rate of History) with authentic transcriptions from the negotiations of the opposition with the state authorities in 1989. In brief.

Hrobka (Tomb), a self-help people’s library

A conspiratorial society of lovers of pulp fiction that had the secret police completely foxed. It met in the Stankovičes’ apartment and published a samizdat journal called Nový brak (New Pulp Fiction).
In the words of František Pánek:
Jde to s náma teďka z kopce,
scházíme se týdně v Hrobce.
Protistátní skupinka - dvě Olgy a Jarmilka.

The weekly trip to the Tomb
Is sure to be our doom
Those subversive gang-readers –
Jarmilka and two Olgas

František Horáček alias Jim Čert

Harmonica player and singer. He trained as a machinist for Chrudim Transport, but has been writing, playing the harmonica and singing since the end of the 1970s. After 1989 he toured abroad and gave concerts all over Europe and the USA. When the police files were opened his name appeared in the lists of informers and – after some time – Jim Čert apologised for having cooperated with the secret police. He lives in Prague and makes solo performances in various bars, pubs and clubs.

Jan Kašpar

Kašpar was forced to leave the Prague Municipal Theatres in 1975, after taking part in the secret production of Václav Havel’s Beggar’s Opera. He thus found himself in the Theatre of Jára Cimrman where he gradually rose from sceneshifter and technician to be an actor. After being crippled by a fall from a tree in 1988, he was confined to a wheelchair. He continued to act with the Cimrmanists and in film, as well as helping with the samizdat Original Video Journal. He died in 2013.

Andrej Krob

Theatre scriptwriter and director, Charter signatory, fitter of sealed windows, first person to stage some of Havel’s plays, and creator of the Original Video Journal. Krob met the director Jan Grossman, Václav Havel and Olga at the Theatre on the Balustrades in the 1960s. In 1975 he founded the Theatre on the Road, where he publicly staged the première of Václav Havel’s Beggar’s Opera. From this time on he was pursued by the secret police.

Karel Knotek

Olga Havlová’s bodyguard from 1990 to 1996. No longer in the police force, he nowadays holds a civilian occupation.

Roman Kuchařík

Like Karel Knotek, Olga Havlová’s bodyguard from 1990 to 1996. Today he is also in civilian life.

Ludmila Lamačová

Known as Snow White. A specialist in Germanic and Romance studies (she taught and still teaches Italian, and translates), poet and former wife of the son of the philosopher Jan Patočka.

Andrej Stankovič

Poet, librarian, editor and film critic, one of the representatives of the Prague underground.

Signatory of Charter 77 and of the manifesto “Návrat krále” (The Return of the King); member of the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted.

Employed as librarian at Prague Castle after 1989, he contributed to the journals Respekt and the Critical Supplement of Revolver Revue and worked in the State Fund for the Support and Development of Czech Filmmaking. He died in 2001.

Olga Stankovičová

Librarian at the Oriental Institute of the Academy of Sciences, signatory of Charter 77, host and chief motor of the society of lovers of pulp fiction Hrobka (Tomb) and publisher of the samizdat journal Nový brak (New Pulp Fiction), and one of the first employees of the Committee of Good Will – Olga Havlová´s Foundation. Wife of Andrej Stankovič. She died in 2011.

Petr Taťoun

Poet and signatory of Charter 77, Taťoun belonged to the circle of friends round Olga Havlová. It is therefore not surprising that before 1989 he worked in a boiler room and after 1989 as an official in the private secretariat of Václav Havel. Whatever his role, he remained a lover of beer.

Zdeněk Urbánek

“Righteous among nations” – the title awarded to Urbánek by the state of Israel. Czech writer, translator, university professor and dissident, and signatory of Charter 77. A friend of Václav Havel for many years, Urbánek belonged to the Orten-Bednář generation that entered the literary scene at the end of the 1930s. His essay “Člověk v mladé poezii” (The person in young poetry) was an attempt to capture the state and orientation of his generation: an awareness of chaos, and feelings of waste and uncertainty in a world that had lost its values. He died in 2008.