Czech your facts – some interesting people connected with Czech

Movie director Milos Forman, who lives and works in the United States was born in Caslav, former Czechoslovakia, now Czech Republic. Among his best-known films are One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and Amadeus.  

Vaclav Havel, first President of the Czech Republic, is a writer and dramatist who entered politics after the Prague Spring of 1968 and spent four years in prison as a result. A leader of the Velvet Revolution, he was chosen to be the last President of Czechoslovakia before it separated into two distinct countries.

Karel Capek was a renowned writer who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1936. Born in a part of Bohemia, Austria-Hungary,  that is now in the Czech Republic, he was a philosopher whose his work ranged between humorous material and serious essays on racism and Nazism. He founded an Art Theater, wrote detective stories as well as plays, and also fairy tales, a book on gardening and political commentaries. He died in 1938 and after the Nazis took over Czechoslovakia his books were blacklisted.

Famous composer Antonin Dvorak was born about 25 km from Prague. He composed nine symphonies, of which his Symphony No.9, From The New World, remains the most popular. He is also noted for many other types of music, among them operas and orchestral pieces into which he introduced Czechoslovakian folk music.

Milan Kundera, born in Brno, now in the Czech Republic, is known all over the world for his novel, The Unbearable Lightness Of Being. He was involved in the Prague Spring with Vaclav Havel and other artists and writers. He writes in French as well as in Czech.

Madeleine Albright, President Bill Clinton's US Secretary of State from 1997 to 2001, was born Marie Jana Korbelova in Prague. Of Jewish origin although raised as a Catholic, she fled with her family to London in 1939. Later, when the communists took over Czechoslovakia, her family moved to the United States.

Eva Herzigova, born in Litvínov in what is now the Czech Republic, is an international model and actress, famous for her part in the Wonderbra advertising campaign, as well as having represented Guess? jeans, Victoria's Secret and Louis Vuitton.

Johnny Rozsa, a New York based photographer specialising in fashion, portrait and celebrities, was born in Nairobi of Jewish Hungarian- Czech parents.

Angelina Jolie's father had Czech roots.