He was the dream of every girl and woman. Klaďas with an athletic figure and dark hair.
The state security tried to get the staunch communist Val to cooperate already in the 1950s, but in vain. As a mere candidate for an informer, he probably dropped a name now and then, but that was all.
It was only in 1986, after the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident, that he began to try and inform the right places about the actors and employees of the theater who took anti-Soviet positions.
He did not avoid the film either, and his first role as Mirko in the communist musical agitation “Tomorrow will be danced everywhere” corresponded to his taste and ideological convictions. The next twenty years in front of the camera made him the idol of girls’ hearts. The figures of enthusiastic bundlers, later kind and wise comrades, came straight from his soul. Warden Zeman in Králi Šumavy or captain Michal Exner, that was something for the ladies’ audience. Perhaps only the greedy ruffian and heartless capitalist Martin Nedobyl from Sňatků z rozúm avoided this stereotype.
A certain kind of symbolism can be found in the title of his last film from 1989 called “Return to the Grave!”
As a breaker of women’s hearts, he did not deny himself even though most of his partners and lovers came from the same professional and ideological spectrum.
He started dating Jiřina Švorcová during the filming of King of Šumava. The icon of communist cinema was already married to the conductor Jindřich Rohan for three years, but she divorced because of Jiří Val. Very soon, Švorcová discovered that her best friend Jiřina Jirásková had become another lover of her Jiřík. The first to find out was Jiří Pleskot, Jirásková’s husband, who came with Vala to say it nicely in Bolshevik style. He put a few on his mouth, but there was no peace. Jirásková must have been very desperate when she wanted to keep her lover by getting pregnant. Vala certainly did not feel like a father. Jirásková had an abortion and friendship with Švorcová was understandably over.
Vala and Švorcová’s wild relationship, full of arguments and breakups, lasted for eight long years.
He lived a great story like from the Red Library with Consuela Morávková, an actress eighteen years younger. After three years it was over, Morávková emigrated to the USA and Vala drank like a rainbow. He always left the women and suddenly it was the other way around. He wasn’t used to that.
It wasn’t until he was forty that he married Emília Skálova, with whom he had a son, Viktor. The marriage lasted thirty-three years.
After November 1989, his career went downhill. His reputation as a staunch communist suddenly became a burden, and when evidence of his collaboration with State Security emerged, filming was over.
He suffered psychologically as a communist, for whom his world collapsed and health problems began. He increased the daily doses of alcohol in direct proportion to his condition and supplemented them with horse doses of tranquilizers. The stroke was followed by cancer.
He died completely destroyed and abandoned on November 15, 2003. He was a few days short of his 77th birthday.
