Edita Brychta was born in Prague, but grew up in London after her family fled the 1968 Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia. Her parents, renowned artists Jan and Lida Brychta, and her brother Alex Brychta MBE, a worldwide published book illustrator, have exhibited their work globally.
Edita began acting as a child in the Czech film Kinoautomat, the world's first interactive movie, presented at the 1967 Expo in Montreal. At 16, she joined London's National Theatre Youth Workshop, abandoning her dream of being an ornithologist to pursue an acting career.
She trained at LAMDA and was swiftly signed by leading agent Ken McReddie. In the UK, Edita played 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 and the BAFTA-nominated The Britoil Affair.
Edita created the role of a Czech girl trying to escape communist-occupied Czechoslovakia in Flying In The Branches. The highly publicized role of Princess Diana in NBC's Behind The Palace Doors brought her 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 worked with directors Ronald Neame, Milos Forman, Richard Donner, and 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, animated films, and numerous features. Among her notable voiceover work are Ming Xiao in Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines and the voice of the mother ship in features such as The Bourne Identity, Pirates Of The Caribbean, and Man of Steel.
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.
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.
