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When remembering the actor Karel Heřmánek, who ended his own life, remarkably little was said about the theater. Although Heřmánek ran the Theater without Rails for 30 years and worked in the theater since the 1970s, for the public he is primarily a film actor. And of a certain, very precisely defined type.
A charismatic bon vivant with a sense of humor, allowing insight even into serious matters, possessing, among other things, a sense of justice. In the socially critical films of the 1980s, Where Gentlemen, Where Are You Going? (1987) or Good Light (1986) this character was built by director Karel Kachyňa.
Kachyňa and Heřmánek were also created in the cult film Death of Beautiful Roe deer (1986) by Kachyňa and Heřmánek, a nice guy who knows how to live, but in serious critical moments he necessarily faces fate. The Kachyňov humanism of people immersed in life with a moral compass in their pocket seems to have found the best and most sympathetic expression in Heřmánek, which still appeals to the majority audience today. Here, Heřmánk’s authenticity as an actor is friendly to the audience, magnetically drawing him in, but at the same time preventing him from slipping into pleasant sentimentality. A subtle Hollywood edge, one might say.
The actor Heřmánek will never touch this goal again. It was as if a director left with Kachyna, who knew how to tune in to the actor and get exactly what he needed out of him. Karel Heřmánek still acted in many films, but he no longer found the Kachyňov power of the 80s. Perhaps he came closest to her in Hubač’s creation Zámek v Cechách (1993), where he plays an old faithful servant who, after the return of “his old lady” (Jiřina Jirásková), restores the lost order in himself, which subverted the communist regime in him. The transformation is certainly kind in Czech, but still believable and impressive.
Nevertheless, it can probably be said that the acting life of Karel Heřmánek has definitively passed into the second half, into the period of the impresario, who also does theater as a business. Among other things, because he did not like the concept of the Na Zábradlí Theatre, where Jan Grossman settled for a few years after the revolution (Bartošek’s friend will create several notable roles here, for example in Havel’s Largo desolatu).
It was not a departure from the meaning of theater, because the theater business is as old as humanity itself. In modern times, however, the focus is more on the education and awareness of the audience, which needs to be entertained again and again. Impresario Heřmánek bet on funny titles, just like the characters he played. That is, in pieces following intelligent insights into life’s vicissitudes, from politics to intimate life. And so the actor’s most famous performance, in which he once played with Jiří Bartoška, Diderot’s Jakub fatalist in Kunder’s adaptation, known as Jakub and his master, returned to the Heřmánk Theater.
Heřmánek and Bartoška played Jakub in the Drama Studio in Ústí nad Labem, they went “outside Prague” to pursue freelance work. It was written in 1975, directed by Ivan Rajmont. The performance acquired the aura of an extraordinary event, not only because the play was written by emigrant Milan Kundera, whose authorship was “covered up” by director Evald Schorm. But – as it turned out in the Theater without Rails – such an aura cannot be transferred in time. The event cannot be repeated even in the theater (not at all), so the famous play did not play out as many would have imagined. It’s as if the theater has lost its inner strength over time, but the devil knows why…
This does not apply to Karel Heřmánek’s film work. His acting aura continues to shine, over 40 years, despite the generations that did not live at the time when the still popular and admired films with Heřmánek were created. Who can want more after death than to live on. Karel Heřmánek succeeded. So in 15 or 20 years we will learn how solid his art had a foundation.
