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Lída Baarová

Lída Baarová:Lída Baarová
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Lída Baarová

Lída Baarová (September 7 1914 – October 27 2000) was a Czech actress.


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Biography

Born Ludmila Babková, she studied acting at Prague Conservatory and got her first movie role in a Czech film at the age of 17. Her mother appeared in several theater plays and her younger sister, Zorka Janů, was also a movie actress. Lida Baarova's first love affair was with the film director Karel Lamač. People who used to know her reminisce that she was the most beautiful woman they have ever seen. The foremost Czech movie director, Otakar Vávra said that her beauty likely infatuated every man she met. After being discovered by talent scouts for the German movie studios, Lídá Baarova left Prague for Berlin.

The road to fame

In Berlin she met Gustav Fröhlich, an actor in the German cinema, and starred in several films with him. In 1935, following her successful appearance in the German film Barcarole, she received several job offers from the Hollywood studios. She turned them down, but later regretted it and told her biographer, Josef Škvorecký:

Lída Baarová:Baarova and Frohlich cheerfully speak with Goebbels during a party in 1936.
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Baarova and Frohlich cheerfully speak with Goebbels during a party in 1936.
I could have been as famous as Marlene Dietrich.

After her engagement to Gustav Fröhlich, she and her fiancé moved to the Schwanenwerder peninsula on the outskirts of Berlin, where their house on the (later named) Karl-Marx-Straße 8 was close to the residence of Joseph Goebbels on Inselstraße 8. Joseph Goebbels was a minister in the Chancellor Hitler administration with decisive voice on the German movie production. Lída Baarová met Joseph Goebbels while working for Ufa films. They started a passionate love affair which lasted for over a year and caused her breakup with Gustav Fröhlich. After Goebbels' wife Magda, learned about this affair, she complained to Adolf Hitler. Hitler who himself was not immune to Lída Baarová's spellbinding beauty, was the godfather of Goebbels' children, and sympathetic towards Magda, asked Goebbels to break this affair. Goebbels offered his resignation and wanted to divorce his wife, marry Lída Baarová, and leave Germany with his Liduška, (Czech diminutive of Lída, connoting love), as he affectionatedly called her, for Japan. However, Hitler did not accept his resignation. On October 15, 1938 Joseph Goebbels attempted suicide. Shortly afterwards, Lída Baarová received a call from the German police that she was a persona non grata and was given consilium abeundi to leave Germany. She went to Prague and, in 1941, to Italy, where she starred in such movies as Grazia (1943), La Fornarina (1944), Vivere ancora (1945), and others. After American troops occupied Italy, she returned to Prague, where she dated her old friend Hans Albers, another of Germany's movie idols. They roamed the labyrinth of narrow streets of Prague's Old Town and spent romantic evenings dancing in the Trilobit Bar at the Barrandov movie studio, overlooking the Vltava River. In April of 1945, Lída Baarová left Prague for Germany, to join Hans Albers in his country house at the shores of the Starnberg lake. On the way she was taken into custody by the American military police, imprisoned in Munich, and later extradited to Czechoslovakia.

The post-war years

In Czechoslovakia Lída Baarová faced a death sentence as many public figures who worked with Germans during the war did, but she was able to prove that she worked in Germany before the war and received only a prison sentence. Thus, in a way, her love affair with Joseph Goebbels and subsequent expulsion from Germany saved her life. In prison she was often visited by Jan Kopecký who, like many others, was infatuated by Lida's magic beauty. Jan Kopecký was a close relative of a prominent politician in the post-war government of Czechoslovakia who arranged Lída's release from prison. Jan Kopecký and Lída Baarová were married in 1949 and formed an itinerant troupe playing marionettes before they escaped to Austria. From there Jan Kopecký immigrated to Argentina, leaving Lída behind to recuperate in the sanatorium of Dr. Lundwall.

In Austria, Lída attempted a comeback, but Anton Walbrook, who was persecuted during the war for his sexual orientation, withdrew from a film where he was cast together with Lída Baarová. To escape the resulting hate media campaign, she left for Argentina where she lived in extreme poverty. She decided to return to Italy. Her husband stayed in Argentina and they were divorced in 1956. Back in Italy, Lída Baarová appeared in several films, including Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953), where she played a Chinese girl. In 1958 she moved to Salzburg, where she performed in a theater. In 1970 she married Kurt Lundwall, a physician 20 years her senior. In the same year Rainer Werner Fassbinder gave her a part in The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant.

After the fall of the Berlin wall

In the 1990's Lída Baarová reappeared on the cultural scene of the Czech Republic. She published her autobiography and a movie, Lída Baarová's Bittersweet Memories, appeared in 1995 and won an award at the 1996 Art Film Festival in Trenčianske Teplice, Slovakia.
Lída Baarová:Lída Baarová's headstone at Prague's Strašnice cemetery.
Lída Baarová's headstone at Prague's Strašnice cemetery.

Lída Baarová suffered from Parkinson's disease and died in 2000 in Salzburg, while living alone on the estate she inherited after the death of her second husband, Dr. Lundwall. Her ashes were interred in Prague's Strašnice cemetery, where she rests with her parents and sister Zorka Janů. Shortly after her death, Bohumil Doležal (Události, November 8, 2000) commented on the incessant accusations, allegations, and media hate campaigns that were part of Lída Baarova’s life since the end of the World War II and did not cease even after her death. He wrote that

"This type of publicity is modeled on behavior of an animal pack of predators and has nothing in common with human morality".

Filmography

Lída Baarová:Lidabaarova
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Lída Baarová:Baarova in the 1937 German film Deutschland with Mathias Wieman.
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Baarova in the 1937 German film Deutschland with Mathias Wieman.

References

See also

Categories


1914 births | 2000 deaths | Czech film actors | Czech stage actors

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