Singer Waldemar Matuška dies in Florida home aged 76

Czech singer and actor Waldemar Matuška, aged 76, died on Saturday in his home in Miami, Florida. The news agency ČTK cited pneumonia and heart failure as the direct causes of death. Waldemar Matuška started his career in the early 1960s in Prague where he became a star of several small theatres. In 1962, he won the first year of a popular music competition, the Golden Nightingale. He starred in a number of films throughout the 1960s and 1970s, including the 1968 award-winning movie All My Good Countrymen. Waldemar Matuška left communist Czechoslovakia for the United States in 1986 and settled in Miami, Florida. He last visited Prague in 2007.