RIP Jiří Krampol

 

The "Czech Belmondo" has passed away. Krampol was a comedian by nature, but he could also do tough guys

Seznam Zpravy

By Tomas Stejkal

July 26, 2025

 

Actor and comedian Jiří Krampol has died, he was 87 years old. The actor, presenter and entertainer became famous mainly thanks to his charismatic supporting roles, comedy sketches with Miloslav Šimek and dubbing.

"And the boys will learn to box with the former champion of the republic of all weights, Jenda Hejtmánek," exclaims Karel Heřmánek in the role of door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman Leo Popper, who has finally been lucky and sold as many Electrolux devices as no one in the region before him.

The boxer Jenda Hejtmánek from the drama The Death of the Beautiful Deer by director Karel Kachyňa was an ideal role for Jiří Krampol. He swam from an early age, later fencing and boxing, while spending a lot of time in the streets of Žižkov. He grew up in poor circumstances, his father was ill, his mother worked. He himself contributed to the family budget from the age of fourteen by hard work at the lathe. So when he gave training shots and curt advice to the Popper boys, he was clearly in his skin. "The punch has to be short, dry as a stamp," he remarked and immediately gained the respect of his charges and spectators.

The popular actor died at the age of 87 this Saturday in the hospital where he was hospitalized. The information was reported by CNN Prima News and Blesk.cz.

The role in the 1986 film was perhaps the best of Krampol's entire career. He fit into what he played relatively often: character supporting roles, fierce tough guys with a bulldog nature. This is how he made his mark with television viewers, for example, as the criminologist Libor Krejcárek in the popular series Little Pitaval from the Big City. That is, the one about which colleagues tell jokes from the first scene of the first episode and later the boss says about him: "You know what they say about Krejcárek, that he has stamina, but that it doesn't give him much energy. Okay, maybe he's not the fastest, but when he bites into something, he won't let go."

At the same time, Krampol was always more of an entertainer. He trained as a turner while working, for a long time he did not seem to have artistic inclinations, and allegedly only because of his platonic love for Milena Dvorská he applied to the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague.

There, his comedy skits did not impress the admission committee too much. It was only Radovan Lukavský who noted that not everyone is intended for dramatic roles. It is as if he predicted where Krampol's theatrical career would soon go.

After graduating from DAMU in 1962, he worked at the Theatre on the Balustrade – at the time of its greatest fame, when Jan Grossman was the in-house director and Václav Havel was the leading author. After all, Krampol also performed in his Garden Party. However, it was his work in Semafor that brought him popularity, where he wrote short stories with Miloslav Šimek and created theatrical scenes in which he could use his sonorous voice.

Pieces where he imitated various foreigners, such as the Japanese railroad worker or the Honolulu citizen Surio Maria Martinez Juarez Ferdinand, became popular. "I made up and he put it in order," the actor repeatedly commented on his collaboration with the bitter pedant Šimek.

Krampol had always wanted such guileless fun. He didn't like political satire, he was much happier when he could pronounce that he was from "Honolulu" in a peculiar way, while overemphasizing every syllable. It was sincere, heartfelt, but at the same time it was humor on the verge of caricature and somewhat self-serving ridicule of other people's accents.

Even the stories written together had a different tone than those that Šimek wrote in tandem with Jiří Grossmann. The jokes were often a little more forceful, as if even these short literary works were getting the physicality with which Krampol played the rewarding roles of foreigners.

He and Šimek broke up precisely because he wanted to do political humor, and Krampol also said goodbye to his theatre engagement. He continued to devote himself only to film and mainly to television. His first post-revolution role in Nudity for Sale directed by Vít Olmer seemed to determine where his career on the screen would go next.

In retrospect, the 1993 film is a remarkable depiction of the time, but certainly not a work that has aged as well as, for example, The Inheritance or Fuckoffguysgoodday by Věra Chytilová. Olmer's attempt at an action film, written by Josef Klíma, represented the peak of the so-called exploitation tendencies in Czech post-revolutionary cinematography. It's a film reminiscent of flipping through the tabloids, almost every scene captures how people lived back then, but also how we resisted anything foreign at the time.

Lukáš Vaculík, in the role of a journalist, embodies the "correct Czech nature", i.e., a man who proudly eats brawn, curses Romani people, and lectures a young Czech-American woman that Western achievements such as feminism are useless. And Krampol, as a private detective and former policeman, fights everyone, but otherwise he is defined mainly by the fact that his best friend is fernet. And the second one is a hedgehog named Pepíček – he also feeds him with bitter spirit.

Nudity for Sale, however, was not an early critical image of this period of transition, but an act that, on the contrary, nodded to prejudice.

Jiří Krampol did not like political humor, but he was all the more willing to appear in problematic films, including Tomáš Magnusek's Bastards series, another attempt to film, among other things, about ethnic tensions, which, in the end, only stir up hatred.

However, similar figurines in not very successful films were not what would fulfill him. Krampol found himself mainly as a presenter. He became the face of the show Nobody Is Perfect, perhaps for the first time as the main actor.

For most of his career, he was more of a man in the background. Perhaps only Vít Olmer has prepared five main roles for him in the anthology film Waterloo in the Czech Republic. The result was one of the biggest flops of domestic cinematography. Otherwise, Krampol has always been considered a charismatic actor of supporting roles and a very decent dubber, who, among others, lent his Czech voice to French stars Louis de Funès and especially Jean-Paul Belmondo. In both cases, he also took over the baton from the great dubbers František Filipovský and Jan Tříska.

It was practically impossible to replace Filipovský, but Krampol found himself in Belmondo. He narrated over thirty of his films, won the František Filipovský Award for Happy Easter, and identified with the popular film rascal on a personal level.

Jiří Krampol was active and hardworking long into his eighties, he was constantly filming, he went to performances. He has been doing sports since he was a child and dumbbells have remained his inseparable companion even in old age. He was the embodiment of the saying "old school man", although especially towards the end of his career it was no longer an epithet with very positive connotations. His values may no longer belong to today, but his voice will be one that will not be forgotten.

KRAMPOL, Jiří

Born: 7/11/1938, Bustehrad, Czechoslovakia

Died: 7/26/2025, Prague, Czech Republic

 

Jiří Krampol’s westerns – actor, voice dubber:

A Canyon Full of Gold – 1972 [Czechoslovakian voice of Tom]

The Dachsbrackes (TV) – 1983 (Tiger Cormack)