- published: 20 Sep 2014
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Lída Baarová (7 September 1914 – 27 October 2000) was a Czech actress and mistress of Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's propaganda minister.
Born Ludmila Babková, she studied acting at Prague Conservatory and got her first film role in a Czech film at the age of 17. Her mother appeared in several theatre plays and her younger sister, Zorka Janů, was also a film actress. After being discovered by talent scouts for the German film studios, Baarova left Prague for Berlin.
In Berlin she met Gustav Fröhlich, a German actor, and starred in several films with him. In 1935, following her successful appearance in the German film Barcarole, she received several job offers from Hollywood studios. She turned them down, but later regretted it and claimed to her biographer, Josef Škvorecký: "I could have been as famous as Marlene Dietrich."
After her engagement to Fröhlich, they moved to Schwanenwerder on the outskirts of Berlin, where their house on the (later named) Karl-Marx-Strasse 8 was close to the residence of Joseph Goebbels on Inselstrasse 8. Goebbels was the propaganda minister in Adolf Hitler's National Socialist government, with a decisive voice in German film production. Baarová met Goebbels in 1936, while working for Ufa films.