Jiří Štěpnička, the Czech Voice of Harrison Ford, Dies at 79. In March He Said the Role Had Been Stolen From Him

Jiří Štěpnička, the actor whose voice Czech audiences heard whenever Harrison Ford, Michael Douglas or Mel Gibson opened their mouths, died on Sunday morning, 11 October, in a healthcare facility in Prague. He was 79. The National Theatre, where he’d been a member of the drama company since 1975, announced his death on its website and to the Czech news agency ČTK. The president of the Czech actors’ association called him “one of the greatest icons of dubbing there has ever been.”

No cause of death was given. The theatre’s spokesman, Tomáš Staněk, told ČTK only that he died in a medical facility.

Fifty one years on one stage

“With deep sorrow we announce that the actor Jiří Štěpnička, a long-standing member of the drama company of the National Theatre, died today,” the theatre wrote. “He performed on our stages from 1975 and in almost five decades created dozens of distinctive roles.”

ČTK’s obituary lists Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew, Shylock in The Merchant of Venice, the Duke of Cornwall in King Lear, Stavrogin in Demons and Švanda in The Bagpiper of Strakonice, a Czech classic. In 2010 he won the Thálie Award, the country’s top theatre prize, for Raymond in Blackbird.

Image: Národní divadlo, Blackbird production clip (YouTube)

Jan Burian, the theatre’s director, told ČTK: “A friend and an outstanding actor has left us, a man whose fate mirrors our turbulent modern history. He knew how to be happy in the theatre and he valued his family greatly. We’ll remember him a great deal.”

Screenshot: narodni-divadlo.cz, 11 October 2026

“The Czech Harrison Ford”

Outside the theatre, most Czechs knew him without ever seeing his face. Ondřej Kepka, president of the Herecká asociace, the Czech actors’ association, put it this way to ČTK: “For me he is above all the Czech Harrison Ford. He made Harrison Ford popular here with his absolutely unique delivery. He is one of the greatest icons of dubbing there has ever been.”

The film site Totalfilm.cz traces the pairing from The Fugitive in the nineties through the Indiana Jones films, up to Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny in 2023. Around Ford came Michael Douglas, Steven Seagal, Jeff Bridges and Gérard Depardieu. In 2002 he won the František Filipovský Award, the Czech dubbing prize, for voicing Mel Gibson in What Women Want. The actors’ association gave him its award for lifetime mastery in dubbing in 2023, and the Život umělce foundation its Master Prix in 2024.

Image: Mistři dabingu, Dan Paukner (YouTube)

Kepka, who worked with him at Czech Radio in the 1990s, called him “a phenomenal radio actor.” And on range: “I’m trying in vain to think who was as versatile as Jiří Štěpnička. The only one who comes to mind is Boris Rösner.”

They stole Ford from him

The last dubbing story he told in public was a sad one. In March this year Blesk reported that word had come from America that his voice no longer suited the star he’d followed for decades. “Apparently my voice is too deep and it doesn’t go with Ford,” he complained. “I spent years with Harrison Ford, I respect him as an outstanding actor, and I’m sorry they stole him from me.”

It wasn’t only Ford. Blesk said he also lost Chief Inspector Barnaby in Midsomer Murders, a part he’d voiced since Neil Dudgeon took over the series in 2011, with the role passing to Jan Šťastný, and that Michael Douglas now speaks Czech in The Kominsky Method with another actor’s voice. The paper noted he’d been widowed three years earlier and that work was what kept him going. The last booking it could name was the French series Miss Holmes, and it asked whether that had been his last job in a dubbing studio. Seven months later, it looks as if it was.

Born in London, raised around a prison sentence

He was born Jiří Samec in London on 16 April 1947, the son of the actress Jiřina Štěpničková and the painter Jan Samec. In 1951 the communist regime sentenced his mother to fifteen years in prison for trying to emigrate. As the film site nafilmu.cz recounts, she spent almost ten years behind bars and only met her son again when he was thirteen. A year later he was in front of a camera for the first time, as a schoolboy in Tažní ptáci (1961).

Czech viewers later knew him as Radek Krása in the retro series Vyprávěj, as a secret police colonel in David Ondříček’s thriller In the Shadow (2012) and in the title role of the 1986 series Gottwald, the communist president under whom his mother was jailed.

On his seventieth birthday in 2017 he told ČTK about some lines he’d written as a schoolboy: “I like ruby red wine that tastes of the sun. I like women, all of them a little, one of them a lot. But most of all I like the sun. It gives wine its taste, women their beauty and me my life.” That, he said then, “could be my life’s credo.”

What colleagues wrote on Sunday

The director Jiří Strach wrote on social media: “Jirka Štěpnička, one of the last of that wonderful generation of amazing and great, because humble, actors!” Kepka posted: “An irreplaceable, charismatic actor has gone with you, one who was superb on the stage, in front of the camera and in front of the microphone, on the radio and in dubbing.”

Štěpnička was married to his wife Jana, whom he met at drama school, for close to sixty years. She died in 2022. He leaves their two children, Jakub, a doctor, and Judita, a lawyer.

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For voice actors anywhere, his story is a familiar one. A country’s favourite movie star keeps the same local voice for thirty years, and then a decision made somewhere else takes the part away. On Sunday the Czech papers didn’t lead with the stage roles. They led with Ford.

Sources: National Theatre announcement (narodni-divadlo.cz, 11 October 2026); ČTK via České noviny, 11 October 2026; CNN Prima News, 11 October 2026; Aktuálně.cz, 11 October 2026; nafilmu.cz, 11 October 2026; Totalfilm.cz, 11 October 2026; Blesk, 11 March 2026 and 11 October 2026; zeny.iprima.cz, 11 October 2026; expats.cz, 11 October 2026. Quotations from Czech sources are translated by Voice Over Herald. Hero image: frame from Blesk’s video interview with Jiří Štěpnička, March 2026 (YouTube).

Lee este artículo en español: Muere a los 79 años Jiří Štěpnička, la voz checa de Harrison Ford. En marzo dijo que le habían robado el papel

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