Lida Baarova Tribute

Lida Barrova was a legendary Czech actress, regarded as one of the most beautiful women of her time. She was one of the most famous and successful Czech actresses to have ever lived.
Her career spanned over 70 years, in the course of which she starred in a whole number of both Czech and German film classics. She even made it into Federico Fellinis I Vitelloni in 1953. But she is perhaps best known for her life off-screen, as one of Czech films most unhappy characters. Lída Baarovás beauty attracted the attention of Joseph Goebbels, and her career - tragically for her - reached its peak in Nazi Germany shortly before World War Two.
She played young girls especially but it is true that in her beauty there was a sort of maturity and spirit. So that meant that she often ended up playing educated women, and playing them well. She really had lashings of charm and received a lot of offers from foreign studios. One that she turned down, which she regretted for the rest of her life, was from MGM. She always said afterwards that if she had taken it, she would have got out of Central Europe before WWII began, and would have got out of the Czech-German surroundings that caused her so much misfortune and unhappiness.
Baarovás beauty attracted the attention of some people in very high places. Hitler became infatuated with her, it is said. But this only lasted for a short while, and their relationship remained platonic. But it was Joseph Goebbels, Hitlers second in command, who fell head over heels in love with her and became her lover. He was completely obsessed with her and willing to leave his wife, his family, for her. And as she herself admitted in her memoirs, before she got spooked and started revising them, she herself said that she was enchanted by him. He may have been a bad person, but as a young girl she saw him as a powerful minister in a foreign government, and a charming man. Their relationship caused such a scandal that she was banned from starring in any more German films. Her career there was over. She was banned from appearing at the request of Goebbels wife, who was a good friend of Hitler. She went to Hitler and told him that her husband had gone half crazy over some Czech actress, and Hitler put a very quick stop to it. Lída Baarová came back to Prague.
Baarova was jailed for a year and a half after the war for having collaborated with the Nazis. Her sister, who was also an actress, was blacklisted because of Lída and subsequently committed suicide. The girls mother was also taken in for interrogation, where she suffered a heart attack and died.
Upon release from prison, with very few remaining relatives in what was then Czechoslovakia, Baarová emigrated to Austria, where she remained for the rest of her life. She returned to the Czech Republic on several occasions after the Velvet Revolution in 1989, and those who met her often talked of her as a chain-smoking, rather sad, very pretty old woman.