![]() For that, I was and still am eternally grateful to him. The only serious article about the case was written by the brave and unique Viktor Ivančić. Very few people stood by me at that time … A few?! What am I saying? There were no reactions. When asked who from her celebrity acquaintances disappointed her at that time, she said: A Nova S article commemorating the event also quoted Furlan, who explained how it felt to be ostracised on both sides of the front lines. ![]() They left the following morning for New York. On a November 1991 evening, Furlan and Gajić’s remaining friends threw a farewell party for the couple in a Belgrade flat. The enormous number of death threats left on her answering machine was the final reason for her decision to leave a country that offered her no protection. She was fired from her job at the Croatian National Theatre and the Croatian state requisitioned her family’s Zagreb apartment. The smear campaign against Mira Furlan quickly escalated. ![]() This fell in line with the growing Antisemitism promoted by resurgent nationalists, who considered local Nazi collaborators from the Second World War true patriots. Among various libellous claims, Bakalović’s text insinuated that Mira Furlan hated Zagreb because of her Jewish roots. “Easy woman” is a local euphemism for a promiscuous woman lacking morals, or a prostitute. In Furlan’s case, the campaign started with character assassination, in a news magazine article entitled The Hard Life of an Easy Woman, by journalist Rene Bakalović. Locally referred to as “media lynchings”, they can be precursors to actual lynchings, perpetrated by aggravated “concerned patriotic citizens” poisoned by hate-fueled propaganda, and armed with actual weapons. Since the 1990s, smear campaigns in the Balkans have not been a mere exchange of opinions. The main ‘charges’ of the ensuing smear campaign against Furlan were that besides working at the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, she also starred in a theatre production in Belgrade and that the love of her life, and live-in partner since 1986 and later husband, film director Goran Gajić, was an ethnic Serb, also born in Zagreb. One could have been both.īorn in 1955, by the early 1980s Mira Furlan had become one of the leading movie and TV stars in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, with roles in Emir Kusturica’s Academy Award-nominated When Father Was Away on Business (filmed in Bosnia in 1985), and the popular anti-patriarchal The Beauty of Vice (shot in Montenegro in 1986), as well as several evergreen TV dramas such as Velo Misto and Smogovci.Ī trailer for The Beauty of Vice, re-released in homage to Furlan several days after her death, gives a glimpse of how most people who had the privilege of following her career at the time remember her as bursting with natural beauty and acting talent.īoth through her acting roles and as a public figure, Mira Furlan often challenged the establishment and served as an early voice for second-wave feminism.īut as the union called Yugoslavia started to unravel, and nationalists took power in successor states, starting a series of wars, Furlan was declared a traitor by the media in her native Croatia. ![]() For much of her life, these two labels-Yugoslavian and Croatian-were not mutually exclusive. On her website, Mira Furlan described herself as a “noted former Yugoslavian actress, currently best known to the western world for her portrayal of the Minbari Ambassador ‘Delenn’ on the award-winning series Babylon 5″.įurlan’s Wikipedia entry she was a Croatian actor of mixed Croatian, Jewish and Slovenian heritage, born in Zagreb. Imbued with a genuine quality of wisdom and compassion that clearly reflected the performer.Īn truly unique person who left an ineffaceable mark on Science Fiction. She turned Delenn into an SF character quite unlike any other. A native of the former Yugoslavia, Furlan’s death inspired a soul-searching debate across the region, about parts of her life story largely foreign to her international fans, who know the actor best for her cult sci-fi roles.
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