Czech actor and playwright Pavel Landovsky, a fellow anti-Communist dissident and close friend of former president Vaclav Havel, died aged 78 on Friday, Czech media said Saturday.

Born on September 11, 1936, Landovsky rose to stardom in the 1960s, when a political meltdown in then-Communist Czechoslovakia allowed the so-called new wave of Czech film.

He starred in a host of Czech comedies as well as in the 1968 Oscar-winner "Closely Watched Trains".

After signing the 1977 anti-Communist pamphlet Charter 77, Landovsky was forced to leave his country for Austria, where he played at Vienna's Burgtheater.

He famously partnered Havel in the recording of the former president's 1975 play "Audience", which was distributed underground during the Communist regime as both protagonists were labelled persona non grata.

In the play, Havel's alter ego named Ferdinand Vanek, forced to take up a brewery job, meets a master brewer ordered by the secret police to write regular reports on Vanek.

As Communism was toppled in former Czechoslovakia in 1989, Landovsky resumed his acting career in his homeland, both in films and on the stage.

Havel, a dissident playwright and hero of the 1989 Velvet Revolution that toppled Communism in then-Czechoslovakia, became the country's president in 1990.

He went on to serve as the first president of the Czech Republic in 1993-2003 as Czechoslovakia split peacefully into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. He died in December 2011.