"Humor is not a gift, humor is a way of thinking."
"The war on human stupidity cannot be won, but neither can it be escaped, because stupidity would flood the world."
"Loving people and loving people is the secret and perhaps the only recipe for happiness. He who thinks only of himself, deprives others of himself, deprives himself of others, stunts and perishes."
People respected him and liked to laugh with him. Popular Czech actor, playwright, novelist, screenwriter, lyricist and theatre director Jan WERICH became a national icon during his lifetime. An important representative of the interwar theatre avant-garde and a leading figure of the Liberated Theatre, he used to make audiences laugh together with his friend Jiří Voskovec as the legendary duo V+W, and in the post-war years with Miroslav Horníček from the stage of the Theatre of Satire. And also as an actor and screenwriter in films that contributed to the creation of Czech political film comedy and as the author of fairy tales that still entertain generations young and old. 120 years have passed since his birth.
He was born on 6 February 1905 in Smíchov, Prague, the only son of Vratislav Werich, a clerk of the First Czech Mutual Insurance Company, and Gabriela née Choděrová, the founder of the Lesser Town Sokol. At his baptism he was given the honorific name Jan Křtitel František Serafínský Werich.
His childhood was affected by the early divorce of his parents, because according to the rules of the First Republic he was entrusted to the care of his father, who was rather strict and volatile. From an early age, Jan lacked a mother's love and grew up more or less without friends. His touching letters to his mother from that time have survived, in which his talent as a humorist and cartoonist is evident alongside his sadness. His mother took care of him during the First World War, when his father had to go to the front. After some time, the parents got back together again.
"I was an only child, and it's a terrible thing to be an only child. I had no one to argue with, no one to fight with, no kids around, not many people coming over, and Christmas looked like that." he recalled.
In 1916 he entered the primary school of the real grammar school in Křemencova Street, where his lifelong friendship with his classmate Jiří Voskovec (then still Wachsmann) began. Already during his schooling he devoted himself to writing poems and short stories. However, he was a rebel and had to leave school in the seventh year due to numerous disciplinary offences and poor grades (he failed Czech and mathematics). He completed his last year of the multi-year grammar school at the Smíchov Real Grammar School, where he also graduated in 1924. Voskovec, who had a French grandmother, studied for the last three years at the grammar school in Dijon.
After graduating from high school, he and Voskovec both began studying law at the Charles University Faculty of Law and in 1926 formed an artistic duo. They first worked together in the editorial office of the magazine Přerod, and soon afterwards their theatrical collaboration began. In April 1927, they staged an amateur theatrical performance of their first play in the hall of the Artistic Meeting in the Lesser Town. Vest pocket revue - the title referred to a small magazine in a vest pocket.
It was a series of hilarious performances, sketches, songs and dialogues connected by a loose plot, which they wanted to entertain Voskovec's friends from Dijon. They performed with their faces painted white, with Voskovec as the film's handsome man and Werich as the laughing satyr. In black and white, they disguised themselves as the famous Fratellini trio from the Medrano circus in Paris. The plan was to perform the play only once, the premiere was to be a dernière, but due to the great success of the audience and some critics, over 200 performances were held, starting with the third performance under the banner of the Liberated Theatre, which accepted Voskovec and Werich as members. They did their own direction and set design, Werich was listed on the posters as J. W. Rich.
Encouraged by their unexpected success, they both decided to leave their studies at law school and devote themselves solely to the theatre. In May 1928, their second play premiered. Smoking revue. Vest-pocket of 16 paintings. What was originally a student performance turned into a phenomenon and Werich and Voskovec became the soul of this artistic stand and the V+W brand became a cultural icon of the First Republic.
"At the premieres at the Liberated Theatre we used to say that if the ceiling fell down during the performance, Czech culture would be over. The auditorium was regularly occupied by all those who belonged to the top of Czech culture - and not only theatre culture. There were writers, painters, sculptors, actors, critics, musicians, composers - as if the premieres were organized by some general association of Czech culture." František Filipovský recalled.
Initially, the audience's successful performances at the Liberated Theatre clashed with the experimental productions of J. Honzl, who left for Brno in 1929, but returned after two years and directed all the plays of the Liberated Theatre until its forced closure, at the same time working as a theoretician of avant-garde theatre.
At the end of the 1920s they were joined by the composer and conductor of the jazz orchestra Jaroslav Ježek, whose music was an integral part of the performance, he composed songs for twenty-one plays. Ježek suffered from a severe visual impairment and struggled with various health problems throughout his life, but this did not limit his talent in any way. The combination of his music with Werich's and Voskovec's lyrics became a significant work of art in its own right. To this day, some songs, such as Dark blue world, Grandma Mary, The world belongs to us, Life is just a coincidence, Bugatti step, Heaven on Earth, Three officers, Hat in the bush, Dress makes the man, Aesop and the brabenec or Centipede immortal.
In 1929, the 24-year-old Werich married his long-time girlfriend, seamstress and costume designer Zdená Housková. She was already at his theatrical beginnings, when for Vest pocket revue sewed the costumes. Later, she worked as a dresser at the Liberated Theatre, but she also used to sit in the box office if necessary. The wedding was quick, without any formalities, which Werich hated. He announced it to his parents at the train window. As he said himself, he was getting married about as one buys cigarettes. In October 1935, their only daughter Jana was born.
As an actor and co-author, Werich participated in 27 titles of the Liberated Theatre. He was inspired by antiquity, the Middle Ages and the cultural scene of the time. In revues he could fully develop his penchant for experimenting with words and improvisation. This is also true for the second of the pair, Jiří Voskovec.
In all the plays, V+W were the main actors. In between each performance, they led improvised dialogues full of jokes and allusions to the events of the time. The proverbial forbini were more or less created by accident when the set toppled over during a planned stage rebuild and more time was needed to repair it. Someone put them in front of the curtain and they commented humorously on current events. Forbins eventually became an integral part of all their plays. Their dialogues were directed against petty bourgeoisie, stupidity and totalitarianism.
By 1932, they staged a merry play Premiere of Skafander, jazz fantasy Fata morgana, a parody Dynamite Island, a military review North versus South and romantic Golem.
The Ancient Game Caesar from 1932, featuring Benito Mussolini as a war-hungry Caesar, the Liberated Theatre embarked on a journey of political and social satire. It was forced upon us by a time filled with the uncertainty of economic crisis, unemployment, social divisions and social contradictions, political tensions and the looming spectre of a new world war.
Game Donkey and Shadow reacted to the rising fascist violence in Germany, followed by a light-hearted merrymaking Straw hat and then another criticism of fascism and Hitler in the play The executioner and the madman. It was already direct, very sharp and consistent. At the instigation of the German embassy, which complained about the insult to the head of state, Werich and Voskovec were banished from the Nováků Palace and the 1935-1936 season was performed under the name of The Shackled Theatre in the Rokoka Hall. This was the setting for the most successful play about the cursed French poet Villon Ballad of rags.
In 1936 the theatre returned to the original premises of the U Nováků Palace and to its original name with the play Heaven on Earth based on the Old English play by John Fletcher Spanish priestwhich Werich saw during his visit to a theatre festival in Moscow in 1935, and whose Russian translation was provided by Julius Fučík. Interestingly, Voskovets, although the son of a Russian legionary, was not allowed to attend the festival, he was not given a visa.
For the tenth anniversary of the Liberated Theatre they prepared a comedy Reverse and face. It became the basis for the film The world belongs to us (1937). After the films Powder and gasoline (1931), Money or life (1932) a Hey rup (1934) was the fourth film of this acting duo.
Theatrical play Heavy Barbora of 1937 openly urged vigilance against Hitler's Germany and the fascist dictatorship. An even clearer warning was given in their next play, their 27th. A Fist for the Eye or Caesar's Finale. The poster for the play featured a collage of Michelangelo's David armed with a gas mask.
The end of the theatre came on 10 November 1938, when on the day of the dress rehearsal for the production of Head against Mihuli the theatre's concession was revoked. In pre-war times, that meant the end of the theatre. The closure of the theatre was most likely due to German pressure. V+W handed the theatre over to the entrepreneur and comedian Jaroslav Kohout, who worked at the U Nováků Palace until their return from American emigration.
Voskovec left the country on New Year's Eve 1938, and because of his original name, Wachsmann, he was referred to by German tabloids as a Jew, although there is no proof of this. He flew to Zurich, from where he continued by train to Paris. There, two weeks later, he met Werich and Ježek, who flew from Prague on 9 January 1939, just before Werich's passport was confiscated. Had he stayed, Werich would probably have ended up in a concentration camp. For his mockery of Hitler and his warnings against Nazism, he ranked 16th on their blacklist.
Zdena Werichová refused to leave so hastily, and with her four-year-old daughter she did not leave to see her husband until March 1939. Werich, Voskovec and Ježek arrived in New York on 20 January on the Aquitania.
They got their American visas thanks to Lotte Goslar, a dancer from their Bound Theatre, a native of Dresden, who left for the USA in 1936 and found a place in Hollywood, where she taught mime and dance choreography. Incidentally, a certain Norma Jeane, or Marilyn Monroe, also took her courses and became friends with her.
Werich, Voskovec and Ježek took English lessons in New York and performed in the residences of expatriate communities. For the New York Office of War Information, the War Information Service, they recorded anti-war radio sketches, five-minute segments that combined their dialogue with Ježek's songs. In total, they made around two thousand of them for the BBC's Czechoslovak broadcasts.
The trio made its New York theatrical debut in early March with a cabaret and musical evening called Take It Easy... Others were held in Newark, Baltimore and Chicago, where Edvard Beneš and his wife visited the performance, and also in Clevelandwhere the head of the local theatre, director Frederic McConnell, came to see them and offered them an engagement. And so, in February 1940, they moved to Ohio and became part of one of the best regional theatres, where Alan Alda and Paul Newman had got their start. Before that, they spent the summer - already with their partners - in the Pennsylvania village of Point Pleasant, where they rented the house of the writer Arthur Miller, later Marilyn Monroe's husband.
Jaroslav Ježek, who was nicknamed Ježura, did not go with them to Cleveland, but found a girlfriend, Frances, Františka Bečáková, from Slovácko, and stayed in New York. His health deteriorated rapidly, he went blind at Christmas and died of kidney failure on New Year's Day 1942 at the age of only 35. Three days before his death, he managed to marry Frances, who took care of him until his last moments. She returned to Prague with his ashes, which were placed in the family grave in Olšany in January 1947.
In 1942 Werich and Voskovec moved from Ohio to California. In Los Angeles, they performed two plays and met Orson Welles, who shot camera tests for the film with them in Hollywood. Citizen Kane. In the end, the film did not happen and they parted ways for a time, Voskovec going to New York and Werich, his wife and daughter spending the next year and a half in the town of Mount Kisco.
Each in their own way, they tried to make it on the American stage, united by their work in radio broadcasting. From March 1942, the newly established Voice of America station broadcast their anti-Nazi programs in Czech to Europe.
The turning point came when they were offered the roles of the jester and the cellar master in Shakespeare's Storm on the stage of Broadway's Alvin Theatre. The show ran from January to April 1945. According to contemporary reviews, V+W would have been a hit on Broadway, but Werich decided to leave America after the liberation of Prague. In October 1945, after more than six years of war, he returned home to crowds of people and journalists waiting for him at the airport. A rented apartment was also prepared for him in the villa in Kampa, which now bears his name and houses the Werich exhibition, which is managed by the Kampa Museum.
Voskovec remained in the USA until September 1946, when he divorced his first wife, French Madeleine Main, and married theatre actress Anne Gerlette. He also applied for American citizenship.
In Prague, they tried to rebuild the V+W Theatre, again in the U Nováků Palace, but the social conditions were no longer very favourable to political satire, and after the war, it was more building enthusiasm than criticism that prevailed. Both of them, along with hundreds of other artists, signed the call Forward, Backward Not a Step! calling on cultural workers to join the action committees of the National Front.
There were disagreements between them about the future direction of the theatre and also problems in the cohabitation of their families in the villa on Kampa, with Voskovec living on the ground floor and Werich on the first floor.
In March 1948, an American musical premiered at the V+W Theatre The Wonder Potwhich opened a year earlier on Broadway. Together they translated and adapted it for Czech audiences. It was the first American musical performed in Europe and in this country. The main role of Káči was played by the unknown actress and future opera singer Sonia Červená and the now legendary waterman Čochtan was played by Jan Werich. Voskovec directed, but did not want to act. "Jiří Voskovec was the director, and an excellent one at that, he was the head of everything, while Jan Werich was the heart, the clown in the highest sense of the word." Sonia Červená said later.
After Voskovec's departure from the country in June 1948, the V+W Theatre closed down and the company moved to the Umění lidu Theatre, now the Musical Theatre in Karlín, where the musical was performed until 1950. The two friends broke off contact for eight years, but they continued to write and talk on the phone. Their extensive correspondence was published in a book in 2007. They last met in 1974 in Vienna.
Voskovec then went to Paris as an employee of the UNESCO secretariat, and with his wife Anne founded his own American theatre there, after which he went to America again in 1950. Upon his second arrival in the U.S., he was interned at Ellis Island for 11 months on suspicion of spreading communism in an atmosphere of McCarthyism. He then went on to star in a number of films, appear on television, and make a name for himself on Broadway with the post-American George Voskovec.
Werich worked as a dramaturge at the Musical Theatre in Karlín, at the Barrandov Film Studios, at the Central Television Studio, collaborated with the Karl Vlach Orchestra, his voice was heard on the radio in fairy tales and stories, and he performed at touring variety shows.
When the new USSR ambassador Nikolay Firjubin came to Prague in 1954, he wanted to see Werich's performance and was surprised to find that there was none. And so in 1955 Werich became the artistic director of the Theatre of Satire, renamed two years later to the ABC Theatre, where he formed a duo with his new acting partner Miroslav Horníček. Together they revived some plays from the repertoire of the Liberated Theatre (Caesar, The Ballad of the Ha...of poison, Heavy Barbora) and also the famous forbins in which Werich again commented on current events.
He also stood up for some of his friends and colleagues and promoted them in his works, such as Natasha Gollová or Vlasta Burian. These activities and his contacts with dissidents - he accepted Václav Havel into the ABC Theatre in 1959, for example - and the satirical allusions in his plays led to his not being regarded as reliable by the regime from the late 1950s onwards.
At the end of the 1950s Werich and his daughter Jana took a car trip through Italy and described their experiences in the book Italian holidays, published in 1960 (9th edition 2010).
In 1961 he retired as head of the ABC Theatre, but continued to work at the Musical Theatre in Karlín. He also worked as a film and television actor and wrote film scripts and books for children and adults (fairy tales Fimfarum, Three veterans a Queen Scooter). For his close friend Jiří Trnka he voiced Švejk in his puppet film, Trnka in turn created the costumes for the film The Emperor's Baker and illustrations for a book of fairy tales Fimfarum.
On television, Werich starred in productions Bear, Tears the world can't see, Carriage of the Blessed Sacrament, King and wife, Pound saved, and featured on Vladimír Škutina's What do you think, Mr. Werich?
Probably the most famous films he co-wrote were the aforementioned comedy The Emperor's Baker and the Baker's Emperor, where he played the double role of Emperor Rudolf II. and baker Matěj Kotrba and the fairy tale Once upon a time there was a king. He has also starred in films The Mystery of Blood directed by Martin Fritz, Baron Prášil director Karel Zeman and the double role of the castellan Olive and the magician in the comedy When the cat comes directed by Vojtěch Jasný.
In 1967, he was chosen as the main negative character in the fifth James Bond film You only live twicewhere he was to play the leader of SPECTRE, Ernst Stavro Blofeld. But after he arrived on the set at the British studio Pinewood, lead producer Albert Broccoli and director Lewis Gilbert thought he looked like a "poor, benevolent Santa Claus". They continued filming anyway, but after a week they decided to replace him because he wasn't menacing enough. Werich later admitted that, apart from his appearance, the problem was his attempt to edit his dialogue, which he considered rather weak-willed.
In 1963 he was awarded the title of National Artist, he won the State Prize, the audience, especially film fans, loved him, but on the other hand he was so called shut out of public cultural life.
Jiří Suchý recalled that he took it with humour when he said "...I'm a national artist, but they won't let me practice that national art".
The year 1968 was a turning point for him, when he signed the Two Thousand Words manifesto and became one of the faces of the Prague Spring. He quit the theatre, his name disappeared from television, and his books stopped being published. Like many others at the time, he decided to use his foreign contacts to go to the West. Together with his wife, he left for Vienna in 1968, but he was unable to leave his homeland and returned home again in early 1969. Allegedly, he was persuaded by a letter from President Ludvík Svoboda.
In addition, his health was troubled, he had a heart condition and in 1961 he was diagnosed with laryngeal cancer. He refused surgery and had to undergo radiation. The treatment was successful, but after the radiation he suffered from chronic bronchitis and frequent pneumonia. He had to wear a special apparatus in his throat, called a nightingale. An avid smoker and lover of good food and drink, he divided his time between the hospital, his villa in Prague's Kampa district and his cottage in Velhartice. He liked fishing and his favourite place was the valley of the Ostružné river near Velhartice, where he had a cottage built in 1938 in the style of Old English houses. He used to come to his "Valley of Happiness", as he called this remote corner of the Pošumava region, with his wife Zdenka and his collie Hera, where he fished, rested, wrote and recharged his batteries. He not only caught fish, but also prepared and hosted numerous visits from famous personalities such as Zdeněk Štěpánek, Vlasta Burian and Ljuba Hermanová.
At the beginning of September 1969 he broadcast a series of 15 half-hour interviews with his daughter Jana on Czechoslovak Radio. Dad, tell me.. Spontaneous Werichian narrative about life was released on two records by Panton in 1971 and re-released on eight CDs by Supraphon in 2013. Werich's last opportunity in front of the camera was in several episodes of the series Mr Tau (1970-72).
In 1977, Red Law published a list of signatories of the so-called Anti-Charter, condemning the Charter 77 declaration, with Werich's name on it. His signature is still a matter of conjecture. He allegedly asked the authorities to strike out his name because he only signed the attendance list, but he was not granted permission. Whether conscious or unconscious, the signature had one bright side: it allowed Werich to say goodbye to the podium with dignity. Twice, in the spring of 1977, a packed hall of the Prague Lucerna could laugh live with the wise clown for the last time. "I love the look in the audience when people are staggering around laughing like a barge in a gale of laughter," admitted the actor.
The last years of his life were not easy for the Werich family. His wife Zdena suffered from mental illness and stichoma, was treated with electroshocks, succumbed to alcohol like her father and attempted suicide. In addition, Werich maintained a relationship with his late love, whom everyone in his home knew about and nicknamed "Josef". He had amorous adventures since his youth and his wife tolerated them. In 1956, Werich's unknown lover gave birth to a son, adopted under the name Jiří Petrášek. They had never met and he probably did not even know about him. Petrášek learned of his origins only after Jan Werich's death.
At her father's request, her daughter Jana graduated from DAMU, became an actress and later an assistant director. At first she performed under the pseudonym Jana Hálová. She used her perfect knowledge of English from the time of American exile as a translator of librettos and texts for plays and musicals. In 1966 she married the doctor Jiří Kvapil, and in 1968 their daughter Zdenka, nicknamed Fanča, was born. Werich had a very strong relationship with his granddaughter. "I love Fanca and everything I do, from breathing to making money, is because of her. And then it's because of Jana," he claimed.
Fanča, or Zdena Kvapilová, married name Hulíková, now lives in Switzerland, and although she starred in a film as a child Long live Ghosts and in the mid-1970s, at her grandfather's request, she played in Semafor.She did not even think of going to DAMU; she studied pedagogy and nursing at the Faculty of Philosophy and works as a physiotherapist in a hospital.
Jana moved with her family to her parents' place in Kampa in the 1970s to take care of them. Her husband could not cope with living with her critical and sullen father, started drinking and left her for another woman. Taking care of her young daughter and sick parents was demanding and Jana also dealt with the mental strain with alcohol. When, on her father's 75th birthday, she decided to undergo anti-alcohol treatment in Bohnice, she was back in the hospital and was diagnosed with advanced cervical cancer.
In April 1980, her mother suffered a stroke. She couldn't speak, walk, she couldn't see. After four days in the hospital, she died. Jan Werich survived her by only a few months, dying on 31 October 1980. An ulcer on his duodenum burst and he never woke up after the operation. In May of the following year, their daughter Jana also succumbed to cancer at the age of 45, and on 1 July 1981, Jiří Voskovec also passed away at the age of 76.
V+W have a common grave in the Olšany cemetery in Prague.
Wikipedia/Facebook/ Gnews.cz - Jana Černá
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