PLZEN, Jan 4: A popular film actress who helped Czechs laugh through the communist era died on Sunday. Helena Ruzickova, 67, succumbed to cancer after a long illness in a Plzen hospital.

Ruzickova appeared in more than 60 films and a TV series starting in the early 1960s. Her latest movie is to be released in two weeks. Most of her movies were light comedies approved by censors of the former Czechoslovakian regime, such as a "Super-Duper Homolka" in 1970 and "Sunshine, Hay and Strawberries" in 1983.

She also played in films such as "The Most Beautiful Age" and "All Good Countrymen" in 1968, the year Soviet troops quashed the communist reform movement called Prague Spring.

In 1996, seven years after communism fell, Ruzickova ran for parliament as a communist but lost. Ruzickova's two-year bout with cancer paralleled the illness of her husband, Jiri, who died last year.-dpa