Jelinek was born on 19 August 1935 in
Přeštice, near
Plzeň. From 1955, she studied at the
Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. The film director
Ivan Passer was one of her classmates, and the writer
Milan Kundera was her literature teacher. During his stay, he decided to visit his old friends in Prague. In the US, she gradually managed to find a place in the world of film, mainly thanks to another émigré, filmmaker
František Daniel. She already knew him from the school in Prague, and met him again at the
American Film Institute in
Los Angeles. The play depicts the life story of the renowned Czech
pre-War actor
Adina Mandlová. Jelinek also wrote the libretto for the opera ''Kafka's Women'' by Czech composer Jiří Kadeřábek, first staged at the Cell Theater in New York City in 2013. For the screenplay for the film
Zapomenuté světlo (Forgotten Light), she found an inspiration in a short story by the Czech Catholic priest and writer
Jakub Deml. She died in New York on 15 April 2020 of complications from
COVID-19, aged 84. ==References==