Life story
Jan Werich was born in 1905 on Prague's Smíchov. In 1926, he created an artistic duo with Jiří Voskovac, which remained in memory under the abbreviation V+W. Their Vest pocket revue from 1927 was a tremendous success and achieved 208 performances.
In the Liberated Theatre, plays were created that became the conscience of the times in the thirties — Caesar, The Donkey and the Shadow, The Executioner and the Fool, Ballad of Rags. Due to satire against Nazism, V+W had to temporarily leave the U Nováků palace, and in November 1938 the theatre's license was revoked. In January 1939, Werich, Voskovac and Ježek boarded ship in Cherbourg and spent the war in the United States.
In 1945, he returned to the renewed Czechoslovakia and with his family settled on Prague's Kampa. Films followed that everyone knows — The Emperor's Baker and the Baker's Emperor, Once Upon a Time There Was a King, or When the Cat Comes. From 1956 to 1961 he was the director of the ABC Theatre. In 1963 he received the title of National Artist.
In 1968 he signed the Manifesto of Two Thousand Words, and during the period of normalization he was not allowed to perform on radio or television. He died on 31 October 1980 in Prague. He is buried in Olšanské cemetery.
Portrait: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain).
Constellation of Life
Important milestones that shaped their journey.