2024-08-13 17:02:05
Actor Rudolf Jelínek died this Saturday at the age of 89. His daughter Barbora Hartová and her family announced it. Jelínek played dozens of film, television and theater roles, he also worked on the radio. In 2020, he won the František Filipovský Award for lifetime acting excellence in dubbing.
“It is with sadness in our hearts that we have to announce that actor Rudolf Jelínek passed away peacefully in his sleep this morning. Beloved husband, father, grandfather and great-grandfather,” the family confirmed.
Rudolf Jelínek was born in 1935 in Kutná Hora, in his youth he dreamed of becoming a physical education teacher or an engineer. However, he graduated from the Prague DAMU. He first worked in the Beskydy Theater in Nové Jičín and the FX Šalda Theater in Liberec. In Prague, he first played in the SK Neumann Theater and Otomar Krejči Theater behind the gate. Between 1973 and 2004, he was a member of the theater in Vinohrady.
Audiences also knew his face from dozens of films, television productions and series. Among his better-known roles were the rider Tomáš Bouček in the film Death in the Saddle, Jan Kubiš in the film Assassination by director Jiří Sequens from 1964, or the intelligence officer Jiří Hradec in the regime series Major Zeman’s Thirty Cases. “It was a very rewarding, interesting role. Back then, it was actually James Bond in the Czech way. Moreover, I was lucky that I didn’t play in works filled with normalization politics,” claimed the actor.
In the new millennium, he acted in the series Ordinace v rozá žádrani, Ulice or Chetnické humoresky. In 2006, he got a minor role as a stockbroker in the comedy I Served the English King.
He had one of his first major roles in the 1958 film Death in the Saddle, directed by Jindřich Polák. In it, Jelínek portrayed the seventeen-year-old Tomáš, who likes horses and dreams of the romance of real cowboys, after which he helps to uncover the perpetrators of a real robbery. The actor used his relationship with horses in the film. Rudolf Jelínek maintained this all his life, many years later he married the horse racing trainer and jockey Martina Růžičková, who was almost 29 years his junior, who also rode Velka Pardubická several times. In 2015, the actor became an honorary citizen of Kutná Hora, where he often went. He had family in town.
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