Queen, Czech grande dame share limelight

One of the main characters in the new Queen Latifah comedy, “Last Holiday,” isn’t a person but a hotel -- the 300-year-old Grandhotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary in the Czech Republic.

In the movie, which opens Friday, Queen Latifah plays a shy, plain New Orleans department store employee who learns she has three weeks to live. Deciding to throw caution to the wind, she liquidates her assets and travels to the Grandhotel Pupp.

The 228-room Grandhotel began construction in 1701, and legend has it that over the centuries it has played host to the likes of Peter the Great, Bach and Beethoven. “It has been remodeled quite a few times and [hosts] a big film festival during the summer,” said “Holiday” director Wayne Wang. “If you go into the hotel there [are] these big photographs of these people who have been to the film festival. Actually in the lobby there is a huge picture of Morgan Freeman.”

In the film, the Grandhotel Pupp (pronounced “poop”) looks like a fairy-tale castle -- it’s lush and richly ornate, filled with chandeliers, antiques and a noblesse oblige. But Wang admitted that a bit of movie magic was needed to turn the Pupp into heaven on Earth: “I think if people went to the hotel they would be very disappointed. It is definitely not like it is in the movie. We definitely dressed it up and did a lot of work to it. The hotel is nice but sparse.”

“Last Holiday,” a remake of a 1950 Alec Guinness movie, shot last winter in Karlovy Vary.

“The winter season is pretty dead,” said Wang. “It was a difficult shoot because there wasn’t very much around the hotel. It is a huge hotel, even with our whole crew there. It was a bit like ‘The Shining.’ ”

And then there was the snow factor. “It started snowing the first day we got there, and it just kept snowing,” said Wang. “We got snowed in practically every day.”

The majority of the cast, Wang said, spent its free time in the one and only bar, in the basement of the hotel. “People hung out there and drank and partied,” he said. “Absinthe was readily available.”

-- Susan King