Edita Brychta

Edita Brychta was born in Prague but grew up in London, having fled with her family from the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. Her parents, Jan and Lida Brychta, are renowned artists who have exhibited all over the world, and her brother Alex Brychta MBE is a worldwide published book illustrator. Edita began acting as a small child in the Czech film Kinoautomat, the world's first interactive movie, which was presented at the 1967 Expo in Montreal. It wasn't until the age of 16, when she joined London's National Theatre Youth Workshop, that she abandoned her dream of being an ornithologist and decided to pursue an acting career. She trained at LAMDA and was swiftly signed by leading agent Ken McReddie. In the UK, Edita went on to play Juliet in Romeo & Juliet, Ophelia in Hamlet, Desdemona in Othello and Marguerite in the world premiere of Vaclav Havel's Largo Desolato, directed by Tom Stoppard. She played Sybil Burlington in the award-winning West End production of Daisy Pulls It Off, produced by Andrew Lloyd Webber. Starring roles in TV series such as Maelstrom, Gentleman and Players, Lovejoy and Taggart followed, as well as the award winning The Escape (Border in the UK) and the BAFTA nominated The Britoil Affair. Flying In The Branches was created for Edita to play the leading role of a Czech girl trying to make her escape from communist occupied Czechoslovakia. The highly publicized role of Princess Diana in NBC's Behind The Palace Doors brought Edita to the USA. She continued to work in diverse roles alongside Julia Roberts in Conspiracy Theory, Jim Carrey in Man On The Moon, James Garner in The Rockford Files and Angela Lansbury in Murder She Wrote. She also acted alongside Stellan Skarsgard and Lena Olin in the Swedish film, Friends. She worked with directors Ronald Neame, Milos Forman, Richard Donner, and in Mark Rydell's Crime Of The Century for HBO with Isabella Rossellini and Stephen Rea. In the Czech Republic, Edita played in her native language in two films, notably the leading role in Jan Sverak's Akumulator 1. With her language skills, she also starred in a French TV series, Cinq Filles à Paris. Her knowledge of languages, accents and dialects makes her much in demand for voiceover work in national campaigns, together with animated films such as Ice Age: Continental Drift, Cosmos and The Bunbury Tails, and numerous features including The Bourne Identity, Pirates Of The Caribbean and Man of Steel, as the voice of the mother ship. Among many video games featuring her voiceover talents are Ming Xiao in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines. She has featured in radio plays for the BBC, including the critically acclaimed Me, Cheeta: My Life in Hollywood with John Malkovich. Edita has voiced many audio books including Jane Goodall's Seeds of Hope and was nominated for an Audie for the trilogy, This Man. She performed a live narration for Leonard Bernstein's The Kaddish at Royce Hall in Los Angeles. For LA Theatre Works, she featured in Daniel Deronda, A Room With a View, Watch on the Rhine and the Tony-award-winning Oslo. Edita is married to producer David Ladd and has one daughter, Lauren Cassidy, by a previous marriage. Her passion is open water swimming and she has completed four swims from Alcatraz Island, the length of the Golden Gate Bridge three times and the 10K distance from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Bay Bridge twice, winning numerous medals. Updated Jan 11, 2020