She had contact with all layers of culture, direct or indirect, from literature to pop. Her great-granduncle was the writer Anton Chekhov (died 1904), her grandmother was Olga Chekhova, a Ufa star since the 1930s, and when Elvis Presley was stationed as a GI in Germany in 1959, she was often seen near him. Vera, born on July 22, 1940 in Berlin, studied stage design, but quickly switched to stage acting and was also seen in films early on: for the first time with Heinz Erhardt, the “widower with five daughters” (as the eldest), then in Georg Tressler’s “Under 18” as a defiant teenager in a reformatory. There was something indomitable in her – “The Girl with the Cat’s Eyes” was the name of one of her most successful films – but it could never be exploited in an exotic way, it was always stuck in the big city, in Hamburg or Berlin. Loneliness was often her fate, an abandonment in which she remained when the men who had promised her love abandoned her, in a new, careless mood of optimism. For example in “The Bread of the Early Years”, 1962, a key film of the Young German Cinema, by Herbert Vesely – she was the daughter of an entrepreneur who was promised to Christan Doermer. She received the German Film Prize for this role.
Vera Chekhova is dead: Obituary for the indomitable actress from the Czech Republic – Culture
