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On the death of »Cinderella« actress Libuše Šafránková: gentle grace, wild defiance

2021-06-10T00:01:14.773Z


The fairy tale film "Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella" made her famous - as a gorgeous daredevil with a horse: Obituary for the Czech actress Libuše Šafránková.


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Kiss my feet, little one: Actress Šafránková in "Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella"

Photo:

picture alliance / dpa / WDR / DRA / ARD

Of course, it is unfair when you think of her colleague Macaulay Culkin when Libuše Šafránková dies.

The Czech actress, who has now died in Prague at the age of 68, has played in many great, including international, film and television productions in her long acting career; almost 60 are listed on Wikipedia alone.

She also appeared in the theater.

But Šafránková became famous and remembered her life through just one role.

In that of the Cinderella in the fairy tale film "Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella".

Like the hit movie "Kevin - Alone at Home", in the leading role of which the American actor Culkin has been trapped for a long time, this film is shown every Christmas in Germany and other countries by various television stations.

Allegedly around ten million German viewers watch the 1973 film "Cinderella" by director Václav Vorlíček around Christmas.

The actress, who grew up in Brno, was not quite 20 years old when she was cast for the fairy tale film, which was shot mainly in and around Moritzburg Castle near Dresden and in the Babelsberg film studios in Berlin and Barrandov in Prague.

In the greatest, stunningly kitschy scenes, you see Libuše Šafránková riding a horse through a snowy winter landscape, gazing ecstatically at the treetops and caressing a mysterious owl.

Above all, in the middle of the forest you can see her shooting a wooden arrow from the hand of the young prince (Pavel Travnicek), who is supposed to free her from the clutches of her wicked stepmother, with a crossbow, after which she proudly announces to the astonished fellow: "Me was it!

Forgive me."

Gender role model for several generations

The young woman who plays Šafránková is both gentle grace and wild defiance.

Your prince is a handsome, dreamy, by no means reckless savior.

Presumably this gender role model contributed to the fact that the two lovers from "Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella" exerted an astonishing charm on the girls and boys of several generations.

The bell music and the warbler songs of the film may be fabulous gay, the costumes with pink dance veil in front of Cinderella's mouth an absurd folkloric evocation of the past - the young hero couple was nevertheless at the height of their time.

Even the potty hairstyle of the prince actor Travnicek, reminiscent of the splendid hair of his fellow nobleman Eisenherz, is evidence of cool seventies chic.

Šafránková's Cinderella is far from the revolutionary obstinacy that Jean Seberg embodied in "Out of Breath" in the 1960s.

But she has left the well-mannered loveliness of Romy Schneider's fifties Sissi behind her.

Her Cinderella was compared to Sissi anyway.

The scenes in which Šafránková breathes against an icy windowpane in the film, in which she defies her stepmother, who appears in a grotesque hat, have been found ravishingly beautiful by many women and men over the past five decades.

One of the less important films the actress later made was with Maximilian Schell and was called »The Day That Changed the World«. For Libuše Šafránková the days in which she appeared in »Three Hazelnuts for Cinderella« were glorious Time that, in no way only in an unpleasant way, changed and determined her life as an actress. As far as one can say with a sidelong glance at the not always happy Macaulay Culkin, it could have been far worse off.

Source: spiegel

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