She started acting as a teenager. During the 1950s, thanks to the characters of fragile girls with a mostly difficult fate, she rose to the top of the audience popularity charts. The role of an orphan in Jiří Weiss’s melodrama Vlčí jáma, which competed in Venice, became a breakthrough for her, even in terms of international attention. Already here, Weiss captured the young actress’ greatest asset – a glassy, ambiguous look with dominantly dark eyes, in which the whole world, intimate and impenetrable, is hidden.
Throughout her career, Brejchová modulated her characters primarily with these views and a perfect face with almost insensitive features. She did not rely on drastic facial changes and expressiveness. The apparent rigidity of the face and the charm of the eyes underlined unconventional charm and seductiveness, but also tragedy and inaccessibility. According to her, she broke away from the palette of “crying” girls with the film Awakening directed by Jiří Krejčík. Here she combined vulnerability with ferocity, which foreshadowed her versatile filmography of the 1960s, when she played her best roles.
“Our Only Star”
She entered the era characterized by society-wide liberalization as an established and unprecedentedly popular actress. The press wrote about her as “our only star”. This was exclusive in many ways. Socialist cinema rejected the modus operandi of Western stars. This is also why Brejchová’s star power was perceived differently. She was not read for her physical beauty and sex appeal, characteristics so characteristic of Hollywood icons.
Her star status was matched by praise for her diverse, psychologically challenging acting performances. Her career was synonymous with diligence. Only Olga Schoberová received a comparably striking national perception of the actress as a real star – but she was exclusively associated with physical attractiveness, following the pattern of Western fashion. Brejchová, like Schoberová, received acting opportunities abroad, specifically in Germany, where she was also enormously popular.
Another, also almost unprecedented, feature of Brejchová was the fact that, unlike the vast majority of her colleagues, she had no theater training. She was purely a film actress, although she appeared irregularly on the boards from the 1970s, which was associated with dwindling film offers. That is also why her acting performances on the screen radiate the elegant and subtly fatal impressiveness of a modern woman.
In the aforementioned 60s, she played various roles in author and genre projects. In the films Vyšší principi and Maratón she played a rebelliously defiant type, she showed romantic spontaneity in the comedy You won’t hit a woman with a flower, and in the revue megahit If a thousand clarinets she showed a dedicated director and a heartthrob at the same time. Her character as Miss in the balladically rough Night of the Nun was layered as an actress. She found the position of an unconventional girl with the imprint of an almost Italian tradition, for example, in the author’s films of Evald Schorm. There she was a partner and a certain opposite of the troubled intellectuals played by Jan Kačer (Every Day of Courage, The Return of the Lost Son). She played a light girl in Farář’s End, in the lead role with her longtime partner Vlastimil Brodský.
She appeared with him in a number of different titles, whether in the dynamic crazy comedy The Devil’s Honeymoon or the popular Noci na Karlštejn. It was their relationship that shaped the media and social image of Brejchová at the time. Among other things, also thanks to the fact that the filmmakers paired them on screen.
Filming with Schorm and glamor in the main role
Cooperation with Evald Schorm was crucial for Brejchová’s artistic growth. In a 1966 interview for Mladý svět, she stated that during the filming of Every Day of Courage, she experienced for the first time what real filming means, precisely thanks to the hard grasp of the assigned roles. although she also highly valued genre projects. The promotion of a challenging film with a potentially weaker viewership benefited purposefully from Brejchová’s fame: the distribution slogan proclaimed “Czech film with Jana Brejchová in the main role”, even though the narrative revolves primarily around the character of Jan Kačer. After all, Love of a Blonde was also advertised as a “film with Jana Brejchová’s sister”.
The onset of normalization logically meant a far smaller variety of roles for her, and at the same time fewer offers. In the 1970s, her characters were primarily characterized by a greater degree of stylization, a suppression of civility and a strong illumination of female beauty and charm. Historical films became symptomatic for her, primarily those on television, where subtly ornate and tight-fitting costumes became an important part of her acting.
To a much greater extent, the camera fetishized her blonde hair, which is the embodiment of the stereotypical perception of the female ideal. The images are thus full of close-up shots, the focus of which is only Brejchová. She played fatal women with an almost ethereal appearance, surrounded by tragic motives. This stereotype is eroded by Noc na Karlštejn, where, on the contrary, it is a proactive character, not a mere figure, however longing for her husband is her only determination.
She could age on screen
She fully returned to characters with an ambivalent psychology in the 80s and 90s (Scalpel, Please, Quiet Joy, Sensitive Places), which was naturally associated with her older age. She could age on screen, smoothly transitioned into the roles of mothers (perhaps everyone grew up with Brejch as the queen from Arabella). The roles of mothers are then significant for the late phase of her career in general, they have become another established type for her. Symbolically, this was also the case with her last film appearance in Hřebejk’s Beauty in Trouble, for which she was awarded the Czech Lion.
When we remember Jana Brejchová, we will probably not remember her characters, but the actress herself. On almost the only Czechoslovak star in a non-star era, who could play like no one else with her eyes and gentle movements of her eyelids and half-open mouth. A star who has always guarded her privacy and will remain in the audience’s memory mainly thanks to her wonderful film images and photos, because few people understood the lens as cleanly and with unostentatious elegance as her.
date:2026-02-07 08:21:00