Jan Kacer's memorable performance in Evald Schorm's Courage for Every Day (1963) - as a man in the right accused by Party officials of being in the wrong - set the moral tone for the Czech New Wave and made it difficult for a talented group of film professionals emerging from the Prague Film and Theatre School (FAMU) ever to turn back.

Kacer duplicated that performance in Schorm's The Prodigal Son (1966), about an artist struggling to maintain his integrity and sanity amid philistines trying to straightjacket creative impulses. After the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague in 1968, Czechoslovakia's most prominent stage and screen actors were under pressure. In 1974, he was banished to the city of Ostrava for political reasons.

Jan Kacer was a charismatic leader during his studies in the theatre department at FAMU. In 1959, he left Prague with a group of actors and stage professionals to work for six years in Ostrava, where their experimental theatre, inspired by Kafka and Beckett, attracted national attention.

His fame spread abroad when Evald Schorm, a colleague from the FAMU film department, engaged him for the role of the "working-man-rebel" in the award-winning Courage for Every Day.

In 1987, Jan Kacer became director of the Vinohradske Theatre in Prague. Since the Velvet Revolution in 1989, he has acted and directed at the National Theatre. Ron Holloway

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