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For decades one of the country’s top movie stars, Anna Geislerová has recently won plaudits for her role as Václav Havel’s wife Olga in the biopic Havel. The film depicts the future president’s struggles in the dissent under the Communist regime as well as bringing to life Havel’s sometimes unconventional relationship with Olga. I spoke to Geislerová about playing Olga Havlová, her own encounters with the Havels and far more at our studio last week.

A new film about the late Václav Havel enters Czech cinemas on Thursday. Simply entitled Havel, the movie traces its protagonist’s journey from dissident to Velvet Revolution leader, while also depicting him as a flawed human being.

Wife of President Václav Havel.

Exactly 30 years ago, on June 8 and 9, 1990, the first free elections to Czechoslovakia’s Federal Assembly in over four decades were held. Following extremely high turnout, the Civic Forum, which had led the Velvet Revolution, received 53 percent of the vote. Trailing far behind was the Communist Party, on 15 percent. Jan Urban was the leader of the Civic Forum’s candidate list at that time. I asked him if it was a result he had expected.

Czech author Zdena Tominová, a Charter 77 spokeswoman who immigrated to England after the communist government declared her an “enemy of the state”, has died at the age of 79. Together with her husband, the philosopher Julius Tomin, she was among the very first signatories of the human rights petition. Despite being hounded by the secret police, the banned writer continued to spread samizdat in Czechoslovakia until she went into exile, after being stripped of her citizenship.

Dr. David Gilbreath Barton, an award-winning American journalist and psychotherapist, first visited Czechoslovakia in the mid-1980s, “fell in love with the country”, and moved to Prague in the heady early days of Václav Havel’s presidency, less than a year after the Velvet Revolution. His new biography of Czechoslovakia’s last president, Havel: Unfinished Revolution, is an intimate, sweeping portrayal especially of the dissident playwright’s underground years and inward journey.

Thirty years ago this month, Czechoslovakia saw its first ever papal visit. Not only was this seen as a symbolic step in the newly post-communist country, Pope John Paul II also gave acknowledgment to one of the key figures in Czech history, Jan Hus, and warned of nationalism in a state that would soon break apart.

Writer and former dissident Eda Kriseová worked closely with Václav Havel during his first few years as president. She headed Prague Castle’s Complaints and Pardons Department, then inundated with letters from Czechs who felt for the first time in decades that they could appeal to somebody in authority. Kriseová, who wrote the only authorised biography of Havel, even gave interviews as a kind of stand-in for the much in-demand democracy leader.

Exactly thirty years ago, Václav Havel was in Moscow meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, and the pact on the total withdrawal of Soviet troops from Czechoslovakia was signed. That very day, the first soldiers began pulling out, as a brass band struck up the “Internationale”, while outside the garrison gates locals bid them a less-than-fond farewell.

Thirty years ago on this day, February 21, then Czechoslovak president Václav Havel addressed a specially convened joint session of the United States Congress. Only a few months earlier, Havel was in prison. Paradoxically, he devoted much of his historic speech that day appealing to Washington to help – not Czechoslovakia but the Soviet Union. Doing so, he said, was the best hope to ensure newfound freedoms.