In the 1960s and then in the 1990s, Urbánek devoted himself to reviving old Prague cabaret. In 1999, he received the František Filipovský Award for lifetime championship in dubbing. As an actor and director, he worked mainly in theater and also in radio.
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Urbánek was born on February 13, 1930 in Prague, and spent most of his childhood in Hradec Králové. After studying acting at DAMU, he joined the East Bohemian Theater in Pardubice, where he excelled in the roles of lovers. In his engagement in Pardubice, he met his first wife, Naďa Balabánová, an actress and singer, later known as Urbánková.
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In 1960, Urbánek left for Prague and settled in the Paravan Theater, in one of the small-scale theaters of the time, where Josef Škvorecký and Ivan Vyskočil, for example, worked. In addition to acting there, he also directed and co-authored the revival of old Prague cabaret until the theater was dissolved in 1965.
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Karel Urbánek on archive photography.
Photo: Profimedia.cz
He continued his engagement in the SK Neumann Theater in Prague (today’s Divadlo pod Palmovkou) until his retirement in the early 1990s. He met well-known directors such as Jan Grossman, Otomar Krejča and Václav Lohniský.
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As an actor and director, he also worked in radio. The radio series How are you, Vondra? Was very popular at the time, in which he played the title role together with Jiřina Švorcová. He also adapted literary works for radio, theater and television. He won the František Langer Award for short story writing for his fiction Confession of Life, published in the 1980s.
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Since settling in Prague in the mid-1960s, he has appeared in thirty film and television films. He got one of the first roles in the film Extraordinary Class, he also starred in several other films of the Czechoslovak New Wave. In addition to the Chalupářs, he played the policeman in the often repeated comedies of Dear Aunt, and I or Brácha also got the roles of officials for all the money. He appeared in television series in smaller roles after the year 2000, for example in the series Redakce or Ranč U Zelené sedmy.
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