Known for wearing a single stud earring and having a curly mass of gray and black hair, Dostál went from being one of the nation's most popular politicians to becoming the most popular after being diagnosed last fall with cancer, which he called "the swine."

He headed the Culture Ministry from 1998 until his death. As the nation's longest-serving minister, he developed a reputation as a defender of the arts in a funding-starved era and as a scourge of the Catholic Church, which he opposed on issues such as restitution of state-seized property and mandatory registration for religious entities.

Dostál's fame had more to do with his blunt and funny manner than his ministerial policies or his battle with cancer. He was liked even by his opponents, who credited him with transcending political rivalries through honesty and charisma.

"My relationship with Dostál shows that politics doesn't have to drive people apart," said President Václav Klaus, whose center-right party, the Civic Democrats, has jockeyed with Dostál's left-of-center Social Democrats (ČSSD) for power since the early 1990s. "I will miss him. The whole country will miss him."

During Dostál's political tenure following the 1989 revolution, Czech politicians went from being inexperienced but open to increasingly polished but inscrutable, yet he remained direct and candid with the public and with his colleagues. This spring, he commented that a media bill "written" by deputies was identical to one suggested by lobbyists.

He wore blue jeans to his first Cabinet meeting in 1998 and once convinced deputies to attend an exhibit of an obscure artist by dropping hints that the artist was important.

"Half of them won't know who it is," he told a reporter for Mladá fronta Dnes, "and precisely for that reason, they'll be afraid not to go."

Such humor made him a favorite with the public.

"He was a people's politician," said Jiří Pehe, a political analyst and former adviser to former President Václav Havel. "Like Bill Clinton, or even George W. Bush, he spoke like a normal human being. He never lost that language."

In the past six months of his life, Dostál was named the country's most popular politician in several polls. By May, 64 percent of Czechs approved of his work, according to a survey by the STEM agency.

Like his fellow revolutionaries, "history brought Dostál into politics," according to Pehe. "They were first and foremost moralists, rather than politicians trained to always say the right thing."

Dostál never achieved the fame of Havel as a politician or playwright. But he did outlast Havel, who left politics in 2003, and other more renowned revolutionaries such as Jan Ruml, the bearded idealist who bowed out of politics in 2004 after support for the party he founded, the Freedom Union, fell below 5 percent.

"Dostál was not a pragmatist in the sense of being willing to sacrifice his principles," said Petr Uhl, a dissident jailed during communism and a commentator at Právo. "But he was free of the ideological blindness that hurt others. He was also courageous. He didn't fear conflict."

Born in Olomouc, central Moravia, in 1943, Dostál studied chemistry at a trade school before taking up writing and directing at a local theater. He said he received an education in books rather than at a university. He joined the Communist Party in the 1960s but left it in 1969, after which he was forced to make a living operating cranes, stocking shelves and doing other manual work.

He returned to theater in Olomouc in 1989 and was elected to Parliament a year later. He joined the ČSSD in 1992 and in 1998 was picked by the party's leader, Miloš Zeman, to head the Culture Ministry.

Jan Urban, a journalist and friend of Dostál's, said he will remember Dostál most for being above suspicion of wrongdoing.

"There was never any hint, even among his fiercest enemies, that he might be corrupt," Urban said. "In the Czech context, that is something."

— František Šistek contributed to this report.