* 5. 10. 1936
As the son of an entrepreneur and builder, Václav Havel was, for political reasons, barred from higher education. Instead, he took an apprenticeship in a chemical laboratory and graduated whilst employed, later working as a stage hand, assistant director and dramaturge at the Theatre on the Balustrades. In his twenties he started writing for literary and theatre magazines, but it was not until 1967 that he was able to graduate in dramaturgy from the Theatre Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts. His plays The Garden Party, Memorandum and The Increased Difficulty of Concentration introduced a new spirit onto the Czech and later the international stage. In the summer of 1968 he spent several weeks in the USA, but in 1969, after the invasion of the Warsaw Pact armies, he was – as a leading cultural representative of the Prague Spring – completely silenced. With his new plays, including The Beggar’s Opera, Audience and Private View, with his essays, manifestos and his everyday attitude, he became the natural authority for independent movements in Czechoslovakia and a leading representative of international culture. He was imprisoned several times by the Communist authorities, on the last occasion in 1989. Following the “velvet revolution”, of which he was the best-known representative, he was from 1990-1992 President of Czechoslovakia and from 1993-2002 President of the Czech Republic. In a television questionnaire in 2005 he was voted the third greatest Czech in history, an exceptional achievement by international standards: in no other country holding such a popular pastime has a living individual achieved such a high ranking.