Casting him in the role was a bit of a lottery bet for TV and film directors. It was never possible to predict in advance whether the young man brimming with life and bursting with energy would live to see the end of filming. Jaroslav Dudek (†68), director of the series Woman behind the counter, was still able to rest. Juraj Herz (†83) had bad luck with the film Bulldogs and Cherries. He had to finish it with a substitute.
Jiří Hrzán measured 168 centimeters. Maybe he had a little need to compensate. He loved women and heights. Tall women and dangerous heights. In The Woman Behind the Counter, he played Fany Krále, who courted the “delicious Olina” played by Hana Maciuchová (†75). The pivotal passage on Olinka’s merry-go-round was filmed before his arrival in the serial self-service. In the meantime, he went on a trip to Ostrava.
He performed there at an event where singer Miluška Voborníková (74) was also a guest, with whom he fell head over heels in love. He got drunk and went to visit her in the hotel room after the concert. But knocking on the door seemed banal to him, so he took it over the balcony. He fell from a height of 23 meters.
“The ravens went for the corpse, and he only had a mild concussion, so they drove back empty-handed,” later recalled the main character of the series Jiřina Švorcová (†83) in her book The Woman Behind the Counter.
“Man, it’s a hoot, but I thought that I had to somehow fall into the pot, that I would unroll it, and that’s how I survived,” Hrzán himself described later. Anyway, in addition to the concussion, he also suffered a broken neck. Although he finished his role in the series, nothing had to be reshot, but he lost the opportunity to play in the film comedy from the Havíř environment Parta hic.
His belt also broke when he fell
This happened in 1977. Three years later, on September 22, 1980, to be exact, he was not so lucky with a similar stunt.
That evening he was drinking in the Prague theater club in Smečky in the company of one of his many lovers, who worked as a wardrobe in the Drama Club. But she left with someone else, Hrzán then had a few more shots with fellow actor Jiří Zahajský (†68), after which he pulled himself together and went after his love.
At three in the morning she found him lying unconscious under her windows in the yard of the house. She lived on the fifth floor… “The barrack was locked and he wanted to get to her at any cost, so he climbed the wall. When he was almost at the top, he took off. It must have been a terrible blow, because the impact also broke the belt of his pants,” Zahajský recounted later.
Two days later, Hrzán succumbed to his injuries.
They could sell panties instead of posters
“I was lying in bed and suddenly the phone rings at four in the morning. They called from the hospital in Karlov náměstí that they found my business card at Jirka’s and told me what happened. I started there right away,” he confided to the newspaper Aha! Hrzán’s friend, music composer Zdeněk Barták. “He didn’t notice anymore. We couldn’t say anything to each other. It was a sad sight,” described a former partner who pulled the well-known furiant out of many troubles in the past.
“To this day, I regret that it turned out this way. But he was an uncontrollable missile. If I overdo it, you’d have to be with him twenty-six hours a day,” he shrugged.
When Hrzán was banned and was not allowed to perform in the theater, Barták founded a group that accompanied him, and together they toured the republic several times with entertainment programs, such as “Role, which I did not play” or “Dear Women and I”.
“The others sold posters to pay for the equipment, we could sell women’s panties and handkerchiefs because everyone was pissed and crying with laughter,” Barták recalled with exaggeration.
Hit the cop, ironed it Gott
Hrzán lived a truly bohemian life. “Before every performance, he came to my house and took a shower, otherwise he slept over with his girlfriends,” Barták recounted. “He had four addresses. He always stayed with one of them. When we were leaving the show, I always asked him where I would drop him off today, in Dejvice or in Braník. And he dealt with it according to the situation.”
The band didn’t have it easy with his star either. Once, when he got thoroughly drunk again, Hrzán got into a fight with a Public Security patrol. He ended up in a police cell. The next day, however, they were supposed to perform in Chrudim. Of course it failed.
The actor did not respond until two days later. “They took him from custody, beaten, to the hospital, where he talked some cat into calling me and telling me what happened,” the composer recalls. “I tried to help him, but it was absolutely impossible to come to an agreement with the policeman who was in charge of him. Only Karel Gott helped us, who was one of the few who didn’t give up on us and was able to iron it out.”
However, Hrzán ended up in court anyway for assaulting a public official, luckily he escaped with probation. And we drove to Chrudim again. “We wanted to make it up to those people. But after half an hour the apparatus left! They’re going to kill us here, we thought. In the end, we performed it acoustically and it was a great success,” concludes Barták.
His work had to be completed by his colleagues
Jiří Hrzán did not live to see not only the premiere of Herz’s Bulldogs, which took place in 1981, but also the end of filming, including his scenes. All in which he appeared had to be reshot. He was replaced by Miroslav Středa (†76). Still, he remained reverently featured in the headlines.
However, he did not finish the post-synchronization for the movie Holiday for a Dog, where he played the father of Tomáš Holý (†21). He was only able to speak for less than ten minutes in the film. In the end, the production solved it so that the rest of his character was dubbed by Vladimír Hrabánek (†70).
The ex-girlfriends did not know where his grave was
He was born 85 years ago, on March 30, 1939 in Tábor. He is also buried there. In his late eighties, the locals had him create a bronze sculpture, which represents him balancing on the retaining wall of the Pierre de Coubertin Gymnasium above the Jordán pond.
Until then, even some of his former intimate girlfriends, including Hana Čížková (70), the star of Troškovy Kameňák, or singer Martha Elefteriadu (77), did not know about his final resting place until then. They only found out from journalists.
“Someone said that Jirka was in Prague, someone in Tábor. I remember him very fondly and fondly. He was amazingly gallant, but living with him was not easy. He was terribly jealous, even though he liked several women at the same time,” Čížková confided to the website ahaonline.cz.
Similarly, Martha Eleftheriad remembered. “Jirka was really a sweetheart. Physically a crumb, but otherwise an extremely charismatic person. We lived together for about a year. But it wasn’t always easy,” the singer admitted.
