He had to choose between two great passions. When the first began to die, he threw himself into the arms of the second. Secrets of celebrities
02/23/2022
Photo: Courtesy of the Karlín Music Theater – Karel Drbohlav
Description: František Paul in the late fifties in the production of the famous operetta Emmerich Kálmán Čardášová princess, which he directed and at the same time alternated in the role of Miška with Oldřich Nový
PHOTO / VIDEO He dreamed of a bandleader’s career, but the audience applauded him with unique clown shows. Let’s look for the surname of a popular daughter of a successful father who has not been idle in life. He received a handful of talents and even had seven offspring.
When his daughter Jana first stood in front of the camera, he was already a hero of comedy and a man of many professions retired for several years. But it is clear from whom she inherited an extraordinary sense of humor and original clowning, always perfectly tightened down to the smallest detail. The quirky speech and the babies were the key expressive elements of the quirky comedian František Paul, who was one of the prominent faces of First Republic comedies. In addition, he was a great tenor and tenor, working as a director mainly in operetta and, among other things, he had an operetta libretto at the end, composed music and lyrics, translated plays, wrote a number of radio comedies and entertainment bands, in which he of course performed. However, the post-war film no longer wished for him, so unfortunately I am looking for a theater where the director usually did not pay much attention to the director.
With Ladislav Pešek in the comedy by Václav Bínovec Jarek and Věra; photo courtesy of Lucernafilm
Actor and bandleader
He was born on April 28, 1898 in Pardubice into the family of a brewer, who soon left the original profession and a restaurant in the city center. From an early age, it was clear that the judges had given him extraordinary musical talent. Although he began to study classical grammar school, at the same time he devoted a lot of time to his great love, private piano lessons, he also learned to play the organ, studied composition and dreamed of one day becoming a bandleader. In addition, he began performing with amateurs, which eventually led him to pursue his dream. In his sixth grade, he left school and began performing with nomadic theater companies, which can give him full attention to both of his passions. He finally became the leader of the band and at the same time played in the theater. However, he did not enter the stage of his first ‘stone’ theater until after the First World War. As an operetta and drama actor and director, he began in České Budějovice and, from 1923, eleven years in Ostrava with a two-year break, during which he returned to Pilsen.
Handrails sings to Europe:
(František Paul as bagpiper Voříšek)
On canvas like at home
He first introduced himself to the film audience in 1933 as the editor Blok in the operetta of director Svatopluk Innemann U svatého Antoníčka. A year later, he finally moved to Prague, where he gradually found employment as an artist with an extremely wide scope as an operetta soloist, actor and director, and gradually worked in the Grand Operetta, the New Town Theater and the New Theater. Then he went to Brno, where he played and directed at the National Theater for two seasons, but his film career did not suffer. The big role was never met, but it became a permanent one, which the directors willingly filled repeatedly every year. He was the busiest after returning to Prague in 1939, when he starred in fifteen films in a single year. It gained the greatest popularity in undemanding comedies and filmed operettas, in which students, clerks, engineers or law enforcement officers played, as well as various craftsmen and tradesmen. He often served guests in restaurants and bars and portrayed artists, from painters to folk musicians to singers and bandleaders. And very often he played men much older than he really was.
Forest engineer Pavel Čádek and widow Růžena Smutná (Nataša Gollová) in Otakar Vávra’s ageless comedy Girl in Blue; photo courtesy of Lucernafilm
The magic of operetta
From the initial lovers, they soon played into the cheerful and kind-hearted of the people who were extremely ‘fit’ for him, and over time to the various old men and grandfathers. He had an extraordinary sense of expressing their character. He used his versatility in a total of eight dozen films. Just before the fascist occupation, he returned from the Moravian metropolis to Prague, where the Akropolis Theater first became his refuge, from which he moved to the Švand Theater in Smíchov after a single season and remained in his ensemble until his liberation. Then he went to Brno again as the head of the operetta, but after a year he was back at the Na Fidlovačce Theater in Prague. After a year, he traveled again, this time as the operetta director of the Olomouc Regional Regional Theater, where he remained until 1954. For the last eleven seasons before retirement, he worked as a director at the State Theater and the Musical Theater in Karlín and Nusle, respectively. However, due to his work outside Prague, his collaboration with the film was reduced to a minimum after the war.
Hotel Modrá hvězda:
The right one until the third attempt
He married the actress Vlasta Kleinová for the first time in 1921, but his marriage took over with his departure to the Ostrava theater. The mining metropolis brought him another love, four years older opera singer Božena Smetanová. They married in 1927 and officially the marriage lasted for twenty years, although its real functionality can be questioned. In 1941, a quarter of a century younger dancer, actress and singer Eva Šenková came to the Švand Theater ensemble, who, like František, performed at Fidlovačka after the war, and together they both moved to Olomouc. At that time, a divorce finally took place and Eva became his third wife in 1947. They had three daughters and a son together, and the youngest born in February 1955 was the great actress and comedian Jana Paulová. At that time, both of her parents were already firmly anchored in the Karlín Music Theater in Prague, her father as a director and her mother as an operetta soloist.
Elén Hadrbolcová, a beauty from forest solitude (Hana Vítová), and Dr. Otok in a parody of Martin Frič Pytlák’s hideout or Noble Millionaire; photo courtesy of the National Film Archive
Master of many professions
In a long line of František’s films, in addition to operettas and simple farces, we also find better quality projects, especially comedies with Oldřich Nový. For example, in the film Vladimír Slavínský’s The Minister’s Girlfriend, his father, the wholesaler Hrubý, played, even though he was only forty-two at the time and only a year older than the representative of his film son. They met in front of the camera even after the war, in 1947 in the crazy Art Nouveau comedy Parohy and two years later in Martin Frič’s parody of the pre-war romantic kitsch Pytlák’s hideout or Noble Millionaire, in which Paul played the doctor Lex Otok. By the end of the 1950s, they still played supporting characters in dozens of films, and in 1964 he first appeared on television as a father-in-law in Jiří Nesvadba’s musical Correction of Jim Valentin. He last appeared in front of a film camera in 1972 as Cipro in the sci-fi story of director Otakar Fuka Action Bororo. But the less he collaborated with the film, the more his work included radio, for which he wrote entertaining shows and comedies. In addition, he had a long list of translations and operetta librettos. A man of many talents and artistic professions, František Paul died on November 8, 1976, shortly after his daughter Jana successfully completed her acting studies at the Prague DAMU.
(sources: Encyclopedia of the History of Brno, CSFD, Theater Institute of the Academy of Sciences, FDB, Wikipedia, Czech Film Database, Karlín Music Theater)
Entered by: Adina Janovská