Life story
Karel Gott was born in 1939 in Plzni. In 1958 he entered an amateur singers' competition, won it, and began performing in Prague cafés; in 1960 he left his job at ČKD and became a professional. A milestone was his engagement at the Semafor theatre from 1962.
In 1965 he founded his own theatre with the Štaidl brothers, and just a year later he won the Golden Bratislava Lyre for the song Mám rozprávkový dom. It was at that very festival that the head of the Polydor record company heard him — followed by a seven-month engagement in Las Vegas, the first German LP Die goldene Stimme aus Prag, and participation in the Eurovision Song Contest in 1968 for Austria.
Songs emerged that entire generations would come to know: Lady Carnival, Kdepak ty ptáčku hnízdo máš from the fairy tale Tri oriešky pre Popolušku, and The Bee Maya, for which he and Karel Svoboda received five gold records from Polydor. His albums sold in tens of millions of copies, making him the most successful Czech performer of all time.
In 1977 he signed the Anti-Charter; he later described this as his failure in his posthumously published autobiography. He died on 1 October 2019 in Prague. He is buried at the hřbitov Malvazinky cemetery.
Portrait: David Sedlecký, CC BY-SA 4.0 (Wikimedia Commons).
Constellation of Life
Important milestones that shaped their journey.
Resting place
Anniversary of death in 26 days