The cruel fate of Leontýnka from Let the spirits live. Dana Vávrová's life ended prematurely

Actress Dana Vávrová (†41), sister of Karel Heřmánek’s wife (74), became a star at the age of eleven when she portrayed the character of Leontýnka in the fairy tale Let the spirits live. However, fate did not favor her. Insidious cancer took her life too soon, this year she would have only celebrated her 55th birthday.

Director Oldřich Lipský (†62) discovered Dana Vávrová for the film. The likeable girl dazzled him with her immediacy and extraordinary talent. When, in addition, she really fell in love with Jiří Procházka (58), alias Dlouhé Jenda, who was three years older than her during the camera rehearsals for the film Let the Spirits Live – exactly as it was written in the script – the final decision was made to hire her.

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“Danuska was a very pretty girl, but too young for me at the time. She was eleven and I was already looking at girls who were growing breasts. She was a little angry with me because of that,” confided Jiří Procházka to the editors of the Prima Zenya website. Platonic love finally let her go. After filming, they never saw each other again. “To this day, I still regret that we didn’t meet in person. We definitely have something to talk about. But we knew about each other and sometimes wrote to each other,” added the representative of Dlouhé Jenda.

Jiří Sovák fought with children on the set

During the filming of the fairy-tale comedy Let the spirits live, he allegedly gave them the most trouble Jiří Sovák (79), who portrayed the knight Brtník from Brtník and the father of Leontýnka, i.e. Dana Vávrová. “Mr. Sovák simply didn’t need us children. To him, we were scumbags, screeching bastards, scumbags. That’s all we heard from him. But we weren’t saints either, and we did him some mischief for that. He smoked pipes, he was so meticulous that he cleaned each one with a special brush. So we hid them from him once. He didn’t shoot for two days because of this, because he declared that he wouldn’t play until it was found,” revealed Jiří Procházka, adding that Sovák was literally unhappy with the children on the set.

“In the scenes where he dances with us and the dwarves, it’s beautiful to see how annoyed he is. And it also worked in the way that he had a stunt double dressed in a costume, who always tried the shot with us children first, and only came when we really knew how to do it,” he added.

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Dana Vávrová fought cancer bravely for a year

At the age of 19, Vávrová married the German director Joseph Vilsmaier, who was 28 years her senior, and moved to Munich to be with him. Three daughters were born to them in marriage: Theresa, Josefina and Janina. In addition to acting, she also started directing and gained respect and recognition in a foreign country. However, her promising career was stopped by a serious illness – cervical cancer. She fought it bravely for one year. She died on February 5, 2009 at the age of 41.

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The former TV announcer Hana Heřmánková, wife of actor Karel Heřmánek. “Today I see that unfortunately we saw each other less than we could have. It’s just that a person doesn’t estimate how much time they have. We missed so much. The tremendous loss that befell us left a mark on us. I reconsidered a lot of things, I look at them differently. I don’t consider what seems important to be extra important,” said Dana Vávrová’s sister.