Helena Vondrackova
Singer / Cantante
She was born in Prague on 24th June 1947. She is a Czech singer whose career spans five decades.
She spent her childhood in the town of Slatinany. She took piano lessons from an early age.
In 1964 Helena won a national talent contest and she made her first recording. In 1965 she was voted the most popular singer in Czech by the Readers of the magazine Mlady Svet, earning the Golden Nightingale award although Helena would win the Silver Nightingale award eleven times and the Bronze Nightingale awards on sixteen occasions.
In the summer of 1966 she began her music festival career competing in the inaugural Bratislavska Lyra festival as a duo with Marta Kubisova, when she won the second place Silver Lyre award.
In November 1967 Helena received the Golden Rooster award at the Rio de Janeiro International Music Festival.
In 1968 Helena performed as a group with Neckar and Kubisova at a Czech music show presented in Cannes with a resultant of a concert for a month at the Olympia Theatre in Paris, after they were consolidated as an act known as the “Golden Kids”.
In 1970 she participated in the inaugural World Popular Song Festival in Tokyo, for whom she made her first recording not singing in her native Czech language. She spent most of the decade touring the world, visiting countries in Europe, Asia and America.
She is the best selling ever singer in the Czech Republic. She got the box set treatment in 2005 with the 4-CD set the Golden Collection seeing release that year.
She has written several books, mostly autobiographical. She has regularly appeared on German television shows as a singer and a presenter for over four decades.
She has had two sold out concerts in Carnegie Hall in New York in 2000 and in 2005.
In February 2007 Helena was confirmed as having accepted the invitation to compete in Eurovision 2007 but she withdrew from the Eurosong contest. In this year she was awarded the Diamond Record for half a million sold records.
Her first husband was East German musician Helmut Sickel. She met him the Sopot International Song Festival in 1977. At present, she is married to Martin Michal. He is a businessman twelve years younger than her and he is her manager.
Charo Mené
English for Fun 4B