George Pravda
George Pravda ( born June 19, 1918 in Prague, Bohemia; † 1 May 1985 in London) was a British actor.
Life and career
Pravda was born Jiří Pravda. He began his career as an actor in Czechoslovakia, where he was on the " Realist theater " occurred shortly after World War II in Prague and played in several films. At the theater he learned the Czech actress Hana Pravda, originally Hana Beckova, a survivor of the concentration camp at Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, whom he married in 1946; from the marriage went forth a son. After the takeover of Komunistická strana Československa in Prague succeeded Jiří and Hana Pravda, to get false identity papers for herself and her son. In 1948 she left Czechoslovakia together and went first to Paris, where they worked as an actor. Having, however, could not get permanent residency in France, they migrated to Australia in 1949, where she Melbourne in their own English-language theater company founded Tana and thus throughout Australia also went on tour.
In 1955, Jiří Pravda and Hana Pravda "discovered" at one of their performances of the English stage actress Dame Sybil Thorndike, who was in Australia on tour. She recommended Pravda to her colleague Sir John Gielgud and the influential English theater producer Hugh " Binkie " Beaumont on. 1956 attracted Jiří Pravda and Hana Pravda to Britain, where Pravda henceforth appeared under the name of George Pravda. Pravda played in the aftermath Theatre in London's West End; at the Old Vic Theatre, he was seen, inter alia, on the side of Sir Laurence Olivier. At the Old Globe Theatre in 1958, he played on the side of Margaret Leighton and Jeremy Brett in the drama Variation on a Theme by Terence Rattigan; It was directed by John Gielgud.
In the 1960s had Pravda in a production of Saturday Night Theatre, a broadcast by BBC Radio 4 series of plays on the radio, with: in January 1960 in The Navy 's Here by Kenneth Langmaid.
From the 1950s Pravda took regularly film and television roles in British and partly international productions. He played among others in 1965 in the British James Bond film Thunderball a dramatic rather important supporting role. In it, he embodied the Polish nuclear scientist Ladislav Kutze, the criminal organization SPECTRE for the works and kept the weapons for possible use and holds. Later, however, he changes fronts, rescues the female lead and defuses the weapons. In 1968 he took over in the star-studded biopic The Shoes of the Fisherman, the role of the Soviet functionary Gorshenin. In 1969, he starred in the horror film Frankenstein must die! brilliant, but also dubious scientist Dr. Brandt, with which succeeded Frankenstein to transplant human brains.
Pravda, the six languages fluently, died in Fulham, London.