Lída Baarová

Lída Baarová (September 14, 1914 in Prague – October 28, 2000 in Salzburg) was a movie actress. Born Ludmila Babková, she studied acting at Prague's conservatory and got her first movie role in a Czech film at the age of 17. Her mother appeared in several theater plays and her younger sister, Zorka Jan?, was also a movie actress. Lida Baarova's first love affair was with the film director Karel Lama?. People who used to know her reminisce that she was the most beautiful woman they have ever seen. The foremost Czech movie director, Otakar Vavra said that her beauty likely infatuated every man she met. After being discovered by talent scouts for the German movie studios, Lida Baarova left Prague for Berlin.

The road to fame

In Berlin she met Gustav Fröhlich, Leonardo DiCaprio of the German cinema, and starred in several films with him. In 1935, following her successful appearance in the German film Barcarole, she received several job offers from the Hollywood studios. She turned them down, but later regretted it and told her biographer, Josef ?kvorecký:

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::I could have been as famous as Marlene Dietrich.

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After her engagement to Gustav Fröhlich, she and her fiancé moved to the Schwanenwerder peninsula on the outskirts of Berlin, where their house on the Karl-Marx-Straße 8 was close to the residence of Joseph Goebbels on Inselstraße 8. Joseph Goebbels was a minister in the Chancellor Hitler administration with decisive voice on the German movie production. Lida Baarova met Joseph Goebbels while working for Ufa films. They started a passionate love affair which lasted for over a year and caused her breakup with Gustav Fröhlich. After Goebbels' wife Magda, learned about this affair, she complained to Adolf Hitler. Hitler who himself was not immune to Lida Baarova's spellbinding beauty, was the godfather of Goebbels' children, and sympathetic towards Magda, asked Goebbels to break this affair. Goebbels offered his resignation and wanted to divorce his wife, marry Lida Baarova, and leave Germany with his Lidu?ka, (Czech diminutive of Lida, connoting love), as he affectionatedly called her, for Japan. However, Hitler did not accept his resignation. On October 15, 1938 Joseph Goebbels attempted suicide. Shortly afterwards, Lida Baarová received a call from the German police that she was a persona non grata and was given consilium abeundi to leave Germany. She went to Prague and, in 1941, to Italy, where she starred in such movies as Grazia (1943), La Fornarina (1944), Vivere ancora (1945), and others. After American troops occupied Italy, she returned to Prague, where she dated her old friend Hans Albers, another of Germany's movie idols. They roamed the labyrinth of narrow streets of Prague's Old Town and spent romantic evenings dancing in the Trilobit Bar at the Barrandov movie studio, overlooking the Vltava River. In April of 1945, Lida Baarova left Prague for Germany, to join Hans Albers in his country house at the shores of the Starnberg lake. On the way she was taken into custody by the American military police, imprisoned in Munich, and later extradited to Czechoslovakia.

Related Topics:
Joseph Goebbels - Ufa - Magda - Adolf Hitler - Hans Albers - Barrandov movie studio - Vltava - Starnberg lake - Munich

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