RIP Jiří Bartoška

 

Actor Jiří Bartoška has died. The president of the Karlovy Vary Film Festival was 78 years old

iROZHLAS

By Jan Herget

5/8/2025

 

On Thursday, actor and president of the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival Jiří Bartoška died at the age of 78. This was announced by festival spokesperson Donátová. The actor, who was characterized by a veiled voice, glasses "half-mast" and the inevitable cigarette, played a seducer and lovers, a poet and a Bandera man, a priest, doctors, nobles and fairy-tale princes. Bartoška had been struggling with cancer since 2014.

Bartoška was born on March 24, 1947. He was one of the most distinctive and charismatic personalities of Czech film.

He celebrated success on stage and in front of a film or television camera. In the 70s, he became the prototype of a lover for audiences, but very soon he also got opportunities in dramatic roles. For example, in the series Sanitka, where he played the poetic doctor Skalka, who liked to use ancient parables.

In recent years, he has presented himself mainly as the president of the film festival. Together with former artistic director Eva Zaoralová and their team, they managed to return the moribund festival to the elite film events.

Nevertheless, he said that he himself liked theatre acting more than film acting. He himself studied acting at the Janáček Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Brno and played for two years in the Goose on a String Theatre, worked in the Drama Studio in Ústí nad Labem and from 1978 in the Theatre on the Balustrade in Prague.

He was very popular with films such as Playground, Raven Settlement, Catapult and Oldřich and Božena.

He used his fame in November 1989 for the success of the Velvet Revolution. He was one of the leading figures of the Civic Forum and it was he who was the first to publicly pronounce Václav Havel's nomination for president from the balcony on Wenceslas Square.

"The best man who, according to the Civic Forum and Public Against Violence, meets these requirements is the playwright Václav Havel," Bartoška said at the time.

Festival President

Bartoška became the head of the Karlovy Vary festival in 1994. During that time, he, together with artistic director Eva Zaoralová, who died in 2022, and their team managed to return the moribund festival to the ranks of elite festivals.

"The festival is interesting, or it's good because of the kind of movies it gets. And I have the feeling that we managed to get films that went on to win the Crystal Globes, such as Amélie from Montmartre and was nominated for five Oscars," the late actor recalled.

"A lot of people think that a film takes as long as it is screened. But a film takes four months, then it has five months of post-production - and it's the same with the festival. It is prepared all year round and lasts only ten days. For me, it is routine in the sense that we know when and where it will be. It is interesting who comes and what films are screened. But those ten days are concentrated for me all year," Bartoška said years ago.

Thanks to the festival, Bartoška has become an enthusiastic golfer. "It's beautiful in that you walk eight, sometimes nine kilometers through a cultivated, beautiful landscape, which is perfect," he noted.

His vice was cigarettes, of which he smoked up to 80 a day for decades. He was well aware of the harmfulness of this habit. "I don't like smoking, I would like to quit smoking. It's my fatal drug, I don't know what I'm going to do about it."

Together with Eva Zaoralová, he won the Czech Lion in 2017 for outstanding contribution to Czech cinema.

BARTOSKA, Jiří

Born: 3/24/1947, Děčín, Czechoslovakia

Died: 5/8/2025, Czech Republic

 

Jiří Bartoška’s western – actor:

The Magnificent 7 - 1960 [Czech voice of Charles Bronson

Once Upon a Time in the West - 1968 [Czech voice of Charles Bronson] 

The Stalking Moon - 1968 [Czech voice of Gregory Peck]

Mackenna's Gold - 1969 [Czech voice of Gregory Peck]

From Noon Till Three - 1976 [Czech voice of Charles Bronson]

Brakýri (TV) – 1983 (Teddy Baldwin)