Karel Gott (14 July 1939 – 1 October 2019) was a Czech singer, considered the most successful male singer in Czechoslovakia and the Czech Republic. He was voted the country's best male singer in the annual Český slavík (Czech Nightingale) national music award 42 times, most recently in 2017.
He achieved considerable success in the USSR and the German-speaking countries, where he was known as "the Golden Voice of Prague",
Early life
Gott was born in Plzeň in the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia (now the Czech Republic),
Early career
In 1958, he was an unsuccessful participant in an amateur singing contest in the Prague Slavonic House, entitled "Looking for New Talent", One of his best-known hits was the title song to the anime series Maya the Honey Bee. In the years following the fall of the communist regime in 1989, Gott was often confronted by journalists for this act, however he denied any wrongdoing for many years, saying that he did not know what he was signing. In his posthumously published autobiography My Way to Happiness (2021), Gott expresses regret writing that "[The anticharta] was a manipulation of all the members within the music industry. And I admit that to this day I am deeply troubled that I got so foolishly tricked."
On 3 May 1977, Gott was awarded the title of Merited Artist, the student activist who killed himself by self-immolation as a protest against the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia in January 1969. The song was recorded in 1977 while Soviet troops were still present in the country. In 1983, Gott was awarded the Gold Medal of Hermann Löns in Munich, Germany, for his role in the development of German traditional song.
In 2009 he was awarded a Distinguished Merit Medal by the Czech state. In May 2014 Gott released his autobiography Zwischen zwei Welten (Between two worlds).
Personal life
thumb|Gott with his wife Ivana in 2012
He had two daughters (Dominika and Lucie) from different former relationships. He married his last wife, , in January 2008 in Las Vegas, and they had two daughters, Charlotte (born in April 2006) and Nelly (born in May 2008).
<!--thumb|left|Karel Gott with German composer [[Ralph Siegel in Prague, 2014]]-->
During the 1990s, Gott began to focus on painting. The first exhibition of his paintings took place in 1992, at the Prague Christ Child Gallery, and his work was since exhibited in Berlin, Moscow, Munich, Cologne, Vienna, and Bratislava.