Vaclav Havel, hero of the Velvet Revolution, dies aged 75

The former Czech President Vaclav Havel, who helped bring about the collapse of communism, has died aged 75.

Havel was comforted in his last moments by his wife Dagmara and several nuns, his secretary, Sabina Tancevova, said in the statement.

A heavy smoker for much of his life, Mr Havel had a history of chronic respiratory problems dating back to his years in communist jails. He was taken to hospital in Prague in January 2009, with an unspecified inflammation, and had developed breathing difficulties after undergoing minor throat surgery.

As president, the former playwright oversaw Czechoslovakia’s transition to democracy and a free-market economy, as well its peaceful 1993 split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia.

He left office in 2003, just months before both nations joined the European Union. He was credited with laying the groundwork that brought his Czech Republic into the 27-nation bloc, and was president when it joined Nato in 1999.

Mr Havel was nominated several times for the Nobel Peace Prize, and collected dozens of other accolades worldwide for his efforts as a global ambassador of conscience, defending the downtrodden from Darfur to Burma.

Among his many honours were Sweden’s prestigious Olof Palme Prize and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest US civilian award, bestowed on him by President George W Bush for being “one of liberty’s great heroes.”

Channel 4 News's Felicity Spector remains her first encounter with Vaclav Havel.

"It was the early hours of the morning when an ever-so-slightly inebriated Havel finally set off for home, and we followed him, to a nondescript apartment block, and managed to record the only interview with him. His wife Olga tried to shoo us away, saying he was too exhausted to speak to the TV, but he insisted - this was a moment too euphoric, too long fought for, to waste on sleep."

Born October 5 1936, in Prague, the child of a wealthy family which lost extensive property to communist nationalisation in 1948, he was denied a formal education, eventually earning a degree at night school and starting out in theatre as a stagehand.

Mr Havel first made a name for himself after the 1968 Soviet-led invasion that crushed the Prague Spring reforms of Alexander Dubcek and other liberally minded communists in what was then Czechoslovakia.

His political activism began in earnest in January 1977, when he co-authored the human rights manifesto Charter 77, and the cause drew increasing attention in the West.

His plays were banned as hard-liners installed by Moscow snuffed out every whiff of rebellion. But he continued to write, producing a series of underground essays that stand with the work of Soviet dissident Andrei Sakharov as the most incisive and eloquent analyses of what communism did to society and the individual.

Havel's first press secretary Michael Zantovsky remembers his lifelong friend.

Mr Havel was detained countless times and spent four years in communist jails. His letters from prison to his wife became one of his best-known works.

The events of August 1988 – the 20th anniversary of the Warsaw Pact invasion – first led to suggestions that Mr Havel and his friends might one day replace the faceless apparatchiks who jailed them.

Thousands of mostly young people marched through central Prague, yelling Mr Havel’s name and that of the playwright’s hero, Tomas Garrigue Masaryk, the philosopher who was Czechoslovakia’s first president after it was founded in 1918.

His arrest in January 1989 at another street protest and his subsequent trial generated anger at home and abroad. Pressure for change was so strong that the communists released him again in May.

That autumn, communism began to collapse across Eastern Europe, and in November the Berlin Wall fell. Eight days later, communist police brutally broke up a demonstration by thousands of Prague students.

It was the signal that Mr Havel and his country had awaited. Within 48 hours, a broad new opposition movement was founded, and a day later, hundreds of thousands of Czechs and Slovaks took to the streets.

On December 29 1989, Mr Havel was elected Czechoslovakia’s president by the country’s still-communist parliament. Three days later, he told the nation in a televised New Year’s address: “Out of gifted and sovereign people, the regime made us little screws in a monstrously big, rattling and stinking machine.”