PRAGUE (Reuters) - After Václav Havel, she has been one of the most recognised faces in the former Czechoslovakia, and after Wonderbra supermodels Eva Herzigová and Adriana Sklenaříkova, maybe the best known body. Now, like her close friend, the former dissident playwright Havel, she wants to be president. But Magda Vášáryová — who has starred in some of the most popular films to come out of Prague since the Czech New Wave of the 1960s — wants to put her screen life aside and talk about her more serious credentials to lead her native Slovakia. "I pushed away my acting career 10 years ago. It‘s history, one part of my life, a very successful history, but it‘s over," Vášáryova, now 50, told Reuters in an interview during a visit to Prague to promote her latest book on social behaviour. A trained sociologist, she speaks eight languages, and has been running her own independent foreign policy think tank for the past seven years. She wowed the often stodgy Vienna diplomatic corps as Havel‘s ambassador to Austria from 1990-93. "I am representing the changes. The really clear pro-integration process…I have been a successful woman with many careers and I want to bring my success to Slovakia." Recent opinion polls show the non-aligned Vášáryová stands a fair chance in the first direct election of a president in Slovakia which peacefully split from its Czech partner in 1993. She has come second behind Mayor Rudolf Schuster of the eastern industrial city of Kosice, a deft politician backed by the ruling broad coalition who has gathered 26 percent support to Vášáryová‘s 10 percent in a very fractured field. But in the two-round election expected to be called at the end of April, where only the top two candidates advance to the finale, her prospects look strong, analysts say. Still, any discussion about Vášáryová inevitably leads back to memorable film roles which made her into a sort of Brigitte Bardot of Central Europe. Vášáryová burst onto the screen in her birthday suit in 1967 starring as an angst-ridden teenager destined for the convent in the epic historical film "Marketa Lazarova", the consensus choice of critics recently as the best-ever Czech film. In a career spanning 170 films and TV plays, she won the Monte Carlo festival 1968 award for "excellence in aesthetics" for her starring role in the film "Krotka" ("Tame"). She also played the object of a village‘s affection in Oscar-winner Jiri Menzel‘s 1980 ode to the simple life "Postriziny" ("Cutting it Short") in which she is remembered for a scene where she bathes in a brewery vat. Czech TV station Nova stressed her friendship with Havel. "I‘m probably more realistic (than Havel). I am a sociologist, not a philosopher, and sociologists are more pragmatic in the positive sense of the word. I want to present this realistic vision," Vášáryová said. She said she wants to bridge the gaps in society which have grown wider in recent years in Slovakia, a country kept off the fast track for NATO and EU membership because of what the West says are shortcomings in democratic reforms of the previous government under the authoritarian Vladimír Mečiar. "What we don‘t have still is a really clear, modern, successful vision of the Slovak Republic," said Vášáryová. Vášáryová said that through the direct election, instead of giving parliament the vote as before, the new president will have more legitimacy than the mostly ceremonial role previously served by the heads of state in Slovakia and Czechoslovakia. Her victory would also inevitably lead to a further warming of relations at the highest levels in the Czech and Slovak republics, which have often been strained since the split.