Actor and director Jan Kačer passes away at 87

Actor and director Jan Kačer passed away on Friday morning at the age of 87, his daughter Adéla Kubačáková told Czech media.

Kačer was an icon of the Czechoslovak New Wave film movement of the 1960s, starring as religious fanatic and Crusader knight Armin von Heide in the 1968 film The Valley of the Bees and as secret agent W4C aka Cyril Juan in Václav Vorlíček's 1967 James Bond parody The End of Agent W4C.

He performed in dozens of other movies and TV series, directed theatre plays, wrote several books and was also active in politics in the 1990s and 2000s. In 2016 he was awarded the Order of Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk for services to democracy, humanity and human rights.

He was married to fellow actor Nina Divíšková, who died in 2021, for almost 60 years. The couple raised three daughters together.