She never aspired to become a star around the world. At the same time, she was very beautiful and talented, but she probably didn’t have the right personality. Karolina Slunéčková (†49) herself claimed that she was sometimes too direct and spontaneous, when she didn’t like something or someone, she was able to show it right away: “I perceive the world with my heart, so sometimes I stuff my mouth. Only then do I realize that there is reason too,” she evaluated herself.
Her diaries said a lot about her
Even as a little girl, she entertained the guests in her father’s inn in Ústí nad Labem with her stunts and storytelling. At that time, her name was still Sluníčková, and this surname perfectly described the nature of the charming girl, who felt like a fish in water in a busy environment among guests. Her parents supported her in all her interests, which were mainly dance and music, as well as acting, and were proud when she won the Youth Creativity Competition in ballet and recitation at the age of thirteen. And they didn’t stop her when, at fifteen, she went across the whole country to České Budějovice, where she studied acting with Věra Petáková.
In her diary from that time, we find a touching testimony of the moment when a girl on the threshold of adulthood set out on a journey to pursue her dream and stood on the platform of the Ústí railway station “with two large suitcases – duvets in one, clothes and useless things in the otherwhich I never needed for anything. I was wearing a checkered suit, a yellow t-shirt, a terribly long skirt, and a small suitcase with food, knitting, a book and a purse in it…I remember very well the moment when the train was leaving and my sweet mom and dad were standing on the platform. His cap was pulled down deep on his forehead, perhaps so that his tears could not be seen…” In addition to studying acting, she also managed to graduate from a pedagogical high school in the south of Bohemia, but after matriculation, she headed to Prague’s DAMU.
She met love at the academy
Coming to Prague was not exactly easy for her. She didn’t know anyone here, no one helped her, she had to fight for everything herself. She only confided in her diaries about what she was going through, outwardly she radiated energy and good humor that her friends loved and men admired for her. As well as her beautiful legs, which some of her colleagues envied. And, of course, the attention of a number of men did not escape. Among all the admirers was also an inconspicuous young man, a classmate from the acting academy Rudolf Vodrážka (†68).
In him she found the man of her life, to whom she remained faithful and never betrayed him. Their relationship, full of harmony and love, was not destroyed even by an environment full of seductions and an eternally busy work schedule, and this is how their only son Rudolf Vodrážka Jr. remembers his parents. But he didn’t want to become an actor himself, because he found out as a five-year-old boy that he was a tremistawhen his mother “offered” him for a kind of children’s role in her home Theater in Vinohrady.
Her end began with the death of her friend
Karolina Slunéčková spent the most beautiful moments with her “two guys” at their cottage in Lnáry na Strakonick. There, she became someone quite different from how viewers knew her from series such as We all have to go to school, The Novak Dynasty or The Woman Behind the Counter. She spent her free time in the garden, went for long walks in the forest and cooked her famous delicacies. Her friend Jiřina Jirásková and her partner Zdeňko Podskalský often came to Lnář to see her and her husband, and they in turn often went to Malenovice, where Podskalský’s ancestors came from and where the well-known director had his weekend residence.
Slunéčková also had a long-term friendship with Nina Popelíková, the unforgettable head nurse Jáchymová from the Hospital on the outskirts of the city. It was the death of Popelíková, who died of lung cancer in April 1982, that caused Slunéčková to panic that she would meet the same fate, as she was a heavy smoker and could not give up her bad habit. Who knows if she showed such intuition, or she suggested the disease to herself with her almost morbid fearbut she followed her great friend into acting heaven only a year later on June 11, 1983 in Prague, and her life was prematurely ended by the dreaded diagnosis.
