The day before yesterday, in Prague, the beautiful capital of the Czech Republic, the actor Libuse Safranova died with only 68 years because of her lung cancer:
en.wikipedia.org
She was not so well-known because of her name but well-known because of one special role in a fairy-tale which was filmed in 1973 in the former German Democratic Republic and in the former Czechoslovakia and later became a Christmas classic movie throughout many countries in Europe:
en.wikipedia.org
Der Märchenfilm »Drei Haselnüsse für Aschenbrödel« machte sie berühmt – als hinreißende Draufgängerin mit Pferd: Nachruf auf die tschechische Schauspielerin Libuše Šafránková.
www.spiegel.de
The story of this movie is almost a fairy-tale on its own because the Czech director once said in documentary about this movie that it seemed at first that everything went wrong because they had only two weeks for all the German and Czech actors to be together at the same location and they wanted to make the movie in springtime with natural flowers. Instead, there was a longer winter with heavy snowfall in April/ May which was unusual but they had to make the movie in this time because the contracts of the actors were limited. No one expected then how beautiful the castle and the landscape would look in the snow and how good the young actors of the Princess and her Prince would look in this time and the movie about a fairy-tale almost became the story of a fairy-tale in itself.
Until today, this fairy-tale is an everlasting success every Christmas time thorughout Europe, especially in Germany, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Switzerland, Austria, Spain, Sweden and Norway:
Generationen von Kindern sind mit ihr aufgewachsen, die DEFA-Koproduktion, unter anderem gedreht auf Schloss Moritzburg, ist bis heute fester Bestandteil des Weihnachtsprogramms auch im deutschen Fernsehen.
de.euronews.com
Moreover, there are castles and their owners who offer special holidays with costumes similar to this movie and its actors and there are several documetaries about that:
And finally, even the music and the singers of the music from this movie are looking like they jumped out of a fairy-tale into reality until today. For example, the beautiful German singer "Ella Endlich" with the German version of the main theme from this fairy-tale: