"Then I met him in person once before the revolution at a birthday party for my colleague Mirek Dlouhy. I had come from a trip, I stopped by their home and there was Václav Havel, among other people. So we talked for a while and everything, but because I had a car there, I couldn't even have a couple of glasses of wine. I went to Mala Strana, we were still living in Mala Strana, and Václav Havel asked me if I would take him to the waterfront where they lived. I said yes, that I would on my way to Mala Strana. I know I gave him a ride. We said goodbye, he was very cordial. Then I had a wonderful experience with him, just after that meeting, when he decided to take me to that 12 Market Square where we lived... And there's a passageway to Rubin, but we all had mailboxes there that we lived in that house. And he promised me that he would put some of his books there, which were in samizdat. And then he told me about it on some occasion. There's an American embassy in the Market Square, that the SS were patrolling there, so he actually had to hide, and then that he threw it there and also had to sneak out again secretly when they weren't paying attention. So it was kind of adventurous terribly."
"We were living in Holešovice on Na Maninách Street and at about 4 a.m. the doorbell rang and it was the neighbor across the street. I was the closest to the door from my room and the neighbour said: 'Open your window. So I opened the window and it was a succession of planes, one after the other, it was buzzing. And I remember that I had arranged with my future husband, Jirka Ornesto, because the boys were on some military training near Mariánské Lázně, that he promised me that I could go to their place in Vinohrady, in Přemyslovská Street, to get the bicycle that my brother wanted. He wanted to have a bicycle and Jirka didn't ride it anymore, so he told me to go there and bring it to my brother in Holešovice. So that's when I really went around Prague. There were practically no trams running, I got somewhere near Wenceslas Square to Jindřišska. Then I walked up to Vinohrady and now I walked past the radio station, past the Museum. There were tanks everywhere. Now people were trying to talk to them. It was terrible. You had the feeling that you were in a movie script, that it was a scene from a movie. It was unbelievable, but the bullets on the museum were telling you again: 'No, this is reality.' Those were real bullets. 'This is not fun, this is not a movie.' I actually took the bike to Holešovice, but I was coming back down Vinohradská Street. It was so depressing."
"Then, when we started going to work with the school, which was from about eighth grade up, and then in high school, you saw the devastation of the borderlands. You'd go to villages where the houses were empty or half-built, so it was very depressing, sad... You didn't think of it that way when you were young. We knew that there were Sudetenland, that it was the Sudetenland, or this kind of superficial history, but practically the displacement was not taught in school in history, not talked about. It wasn't until really much later, in the late sixties, that the subject was brought up for a while. And it's a sore wound to this day, the way some politicians and so on feel about it. The fact that they are operating with it again, intimidating, it's still alive today. There were the potato summer jobs, the strawberry summer jobs , and then we went to the hops, but the hops were a little bit different from the borderlands. It was during these trips to the summer jobs that you mapped it out the most, because you didn't go to any attractive locations, you went to the abandoned ones."
Daniela Kolářová was born on 21 September 1946 in Cheb. She grew up in Karlovy Vary, where her mother worked, among other things, in the theatre’s accounting department. In Karlovy Vary, she stood on the theatre stage for the first time in a production of the fairy tale The Emperor’s New Clothes. The surroundings of Karlovy Vary, with the abandoned and crumbling houses that formed the colour of the post-war border region in the nearby villages, marked her very much. At the Karlovy Vary Secondary School of General Education (SVVŠ) she performed in a student theatre of small forms (first named Štycháček, later Kapsa). It was then that the decision to pursue theatre prevailed over her original intention to study at the Institute of Physical Education and Sport. In 1968 she graduated in acting from the DAMU in Prague. During her studies she met her future husband Jiří Ornesto. In 1968 she started her first engagement at the S. K. Neumann Theatre. In 1971, she joined the Vinohrady Theatre, where she remained until 2015 and performed a number of theatre roles in important productions (e.g. The Robber, Hamlet, For Whom the Edge Tolls, The Makropulos Affair...). She has also created many diverse characters in front of film and television cameras (e.g., Night at Karlštejn, In the Secluded Forest, Summer with the Cowboy, The Returning Bottles, Kawasaki’s Rose; on television, e.g., Marriages of Reason, Such a Normal Family, Hospital on the Edge of Town, The Sons and Daughters of Jacob the Glassmaker, Bad Blood, On the Bench of the Judiciary, PF 77, and The Life and Times of Judge A. K.). In 1990-1992, she was a member of the Czech National Council for the Civic Forum, then for the Civic Movement. She is a recipient of the Alfred Radok Award and the Czech Lion Award. She is still a guest in several Prague theatres. She has two sons, Simon and Matěj, from her marriage to Jiří Ornest.
