Karel Gott (born July 14, 1939) has been arguably the most successful Czech singer (crooner) between the 1960s and 2000.

Born in Western Bohemian town Plzen which was part of the German-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Gott was later trained to be mechanic while performing as an amateur singer in various Prague pubs of the late 1950s. In 1960, he started to study singing at the Prague conservatoire, his first short record "Mesícní reka" (a Czech version of Henry Mancini's "Moon River") being issued in 1962. Since 1963 Gott had swiftly occupied the leading position on the Czechoslovak pop scene, while his first international successes followed his five months stay in Las Vegas. In 1969, Gott won the music festival in Rio de Janeiro with composer Karel Svoboda's most transparent hit Lady Carneval. Between 1965 when his first LP Zpívá Karel Gott (Karel Gott Singing) was published and the mid 1990s, 50 LP's of Gott were published by Czech publishing house Supraphon, making him the best selling performer in Czech musical business, while there have been some 80 records published abroad, most of them under Polydor. In the early 1970s, Gott started his career in former West Germany and Austria also, where his name still enjoys a good sound among the older generation with hits such as "Babicka" ("Granny") and "Biene Maja" ("Maya the Bee").

During his German stay in 1971, Gott expressed his intention not to return back to Soviet occupied Czechoslovakia and did not change his mind until he was addressed a private letter signed by the first secretary of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia Gustáv Husák. Until the present day, the exact content of this letter is not known, yet it is widely believed that Husák was convincing the singer in an emotional way to come home by pointing to Gott's importance for easing popular conformity with the new occupation regime.

During the Czechoslovak "Velvet Revolution", Gott sang the Czech national anthem on the balcony over the rallied demonstrators, nevertheless the singer's position became to deteriorate in the following period as he was viewed an old fashioned (yet musically still not overshadowed) symbol of the past two decades. He was particularly reproached for having taken part in the notorious "anticharta" ceremony which was a hateful regime-orchestrated reaction to the famous opposition initiative Charter 77. Gott staged there as one of the prominent speakers. In 1991 he explained this "sin" by saying that he had not been familiar with the contents of Charter 77 before reading the officially prescripted document and that he like the other official artists was not precisely told what was to be the point of the "anticharta" meeting, although he added that he felt something went wrong. The contradictory feeling of Gott was pointed up in 2000 when he was a hot candidate for the main attraction at the Expo 2000's Czech exposition in Hannover. This idea was vociferously criticized by historian of architecture Zdenek Lukeš and his famous sentence: "Gott is a zombie who used to chase me for all of my childhood and corrupted the taste of many generations". Following this statement, Karel Gott angrily suspended his application and had to be persuaded not to do so by personal intervention of the ministry of culture Pavel Dostál. However, the German youngsters' lively reaction to Gott performing his "classic" Biene Maja at EXPO showed that he still enjoys much prominence not only in his country.

Karel Gott's lyrical tenor, his extraordinary voice dispositions together with the singer's broad genre skills make Gott the most successful musical interpreter throughout Czech history.

In 2004, he decided to spend an unusual Christmas, and therefore he traveled to Maldives right before the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake. He survived.