Singer Hana Zagorová died, she was 75 years old. Her manager Luboš Kříž confirmed the information to Radiožurnál. For decades, she belonged to the “family silver” of Czech pop music. She was a performer of prized chansons and simple disco songs. She became famous with hits such as My Time, Rainbow Fairy, Paint Again Pictures, Juliet’s Maze, Silver Well, Extraordinary Line, Biograf láska, or It’s Absolutely Necessary.
Zagorová was accompanied by health problems for a long time. Her condition began to deteriorate after she contracted the very severe coronavirus in September 2020. Due to fatigue and weakening of the organism, she has cancelled her work commitments since last August.
A native of Petřkovice in Ostrava, she has recorded 22 solo studio albums in her nearly sixty-year career. Even before she moved to Prague, she began studying acting at the Janáček Academy of Performing Arts in Brno.
She drew attention to herself for the first time at the Hledám nové talenty competition in Ostrava, where she was accompanied by the Gustav Brom Orchestra.
And one of the first songs, thanks to which she became widely known in 1971, was Bludička Julie.
In 1979, she spoke about her youth on Czechoslovak Radio as follows: “Our whole house smelled of something good that was being cooked. I remember all of this being accompanied by my mother whistling non-stop or the radio being played non-stop. I started writing poems, such as: A very dirty little ant burned on a hill.’
Hana Zagorová captivated her fans with disco songs, but also chansons. In the world of popular music, the composition Maluj zase pictures also stood out. Despite the almost six-minute footage, domestic radio stations still play it today.
“That’s a song that’s flawless. Really Pavel Žák, she is one of my favorite composers. She wrote about 300 songs for me. In this case, she wrote both the music and the lyrics. I remember when I was at her house when she first played me a song on the piano. That doesn’t happen to me often, so I even cried because I found her so incredibly touching,” she recalled.
In the 1980s, Zagorová collaborated with Stanislav Hložek and Petr Rezek, with whom she gave concerts almost every day – not only in the Czech Republic but also in Poland and Germany.
She never fundamentally criticized the powerful. That’s why when she signed the Few Sentences petition in 1989, it was a big surprise.
In her famous speech from Červený Hrádek in Pilsen, the then communist leader Miloš Jakeš also spoke about it. Thanks to the revolution, Zagorová was banned from performing for only a few months.
‘I’m going to achieve something amazingly big’
After the breakup of her marriage with the dancer Vlastimil Harapes, she found a new love in opera tenor Štefan Margit. Together with him, she hosted, for example, the TV show Hogo Fogo.
And she continued to record albums with new songs – in 2016 it was the album O lásce and two years later her last studio solo album Já ném strách was released. In 2020, she and Margita recorded an album called Finally together.
“When I was little, I was convinced that when I was an adult, I would achieve something amazingly big and beautiful in my life, or I would succeed in my life,” she said to herself.
And succeeded. During her career, which began in 1963, Hana Zagorová released over 900 songs. In the 1970s and 1980s, she became a nine-time winner of the Golden Nightingale, only Lucie Bílá has more awards. In 2015, she was also inducted into the Hall of Fame by academics at the Anděl Music Awards.
Amelia Warner
Amelia Warner writes all the Latest Articles. She mostly covers Entertainment topics, but at times loves to write about movie reviews as well.
