Lida Baarov obituary

published 08/11/2000 at 02:15 GMT

Beautiful Czech actress who turned down Hollywood to become Goebbels's mistress

When the Czech actress Lida Baarová, who has died aged 86, first went to Berlin in 1934 and began mixing with leading Nazis, she felt as if she was in heaven. The regrets came later. Six decades on she told me of the offers to go to Hollywood, which she had turned down. If she had got out of the clutches of the Nazis, she observed, she could have been as famous as Marlene Dietrich.

Perhaps. But at the time she basked in the attention she received from Adolf Hitler's followers, particularly his propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels. She will be best remembered for the affair she had with him, which threatened his career, rather than for her acting.

Like many of the Nazi elite, she and her German actor husband, Gustav Fröhlich - with whom she had co-starred in her first German film Barcarole (1935) which had made her a household name - lived in a Berlin villa on the picturesque Wannsee, just three doors down from Goebbels. He ardently pursued her, entertaining her in his villa and lavishing her with expensive gifts. When Fröhlich, who had starred in Fritz Lang's 1927 film Metropolis found out, legend has it that he challenged him to a duel. Another story was that Fröhlich's friends found Goebbels at Baarová's flat and beat him up.

Fröhlich was briefly detained in a concentration camp, but it was Goebbels's wife, Magda, who went to Hitler about her husband's behaviour. Hitler was furious, refusing Goebbels permission to divorce Magda and marry Baarová. Instead, he commanded Goebbels never to see his mistress again. Baarová fled to her native Prague, abandoning a glittering career. Historians tell it slightly differently: through the head of the Berlin police, Hitler ordered her extradition and banned her films. "Life is so hard and cruel," Goebbels wrote in his diary, although his passion for Nazism was greater than his love for Baarová. But the resulting despair is said to have driven him to threaten suicide.

Despite his stated disapproval of the "inferior Slav", even the Führer showed romantic interest in the actress. They first met when he visited the studio where she was filming with Fröhlich. He later invited her for tea.

She drove herself in her BMW, which, she noted, Hitler found "a little strange". He told her of her similarity to Gerri Raubel, one of his ex-lovers, who had shot herself. At another tea-time meeting, he tried to persuade her to renounce her Czechoslovak nationality. "But I told him 'I like being a Czechoslovak citizen.' " The tea-time invitations stopped coming.

Born in Prague, the daughter of a civil servant, Baarová became a star of the Czechoslovak cinema at 21 after her first film, The Career of Pavel Camrda (1931). In 1934, the German company UFA signed her up, and the role as Giacinta in Barcarole followed. Her final German film was Der Spieler (The Gambler) in 1937.

Her flight to Prague brought no security, for the Germans invaded in March 1939, completing their dismemberment of her homeland. From 1942 she made films in Italy, but after the fall of Mussolini she returned to Prague. Accused of collaboration in 1945, she was imprisoned until late 1946. She then married a theatre agent, Jan Kopecky - who was related to the Communist interior minister. After an abortive attempt to escape from Czechoslovakia the couple were, curiously, allowed to leave; they went to Argentina and then to Spain.

In the 1950s Baarová acted in several Italian and Spanish films, including Federico Fellini's I Vitelloni (1953). She divorced in 1956, moved to Salzburg and took Austrian citizenship. In 1970 she married a Salzburg gynaecologist, Kurt Lundwall, who was 20 years her senior; he died three years later.

She had returned to the stage in 1960 in Düsseldorf. But even in Austria many never forgave her. In 1967, at the Graz theatre, she was met by groups of egg-throwing protesters. By 1975 she was appearing in the German stage version of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant.

Baarová was rediscovered in the 1990s. A film biography was shot in Salzburg in 1995. In later years she turned to drink, saying that her acquaintance with Goebbels had "made my life hell". Even in her final interviews three years ago, she denied that there had been an affair.

Yet she appeared unrepentant, saying she had been "young and naive", and not remotely politically aware. "I was not a Nazi, but like other women I was afraid to say no to such men," she said. About the Nazi crimes, she simply shrugged. "I feel indifferent," she told me. " I just want to forget the whole episode."

Her autobiography, Escapes, was published in 1983; a second volume, The Soft Bitterness of Life, is due out soon. One of her last wishes had been to return to Prague, but she never managed it. Police found her body in her Salzburg flat.

Lida Baarová (Ludmila Babkova), actress, born May 12 1914; died October 27 2000