Sad news: a wonderful Croatian actress and a true legend of our theatre has passed away. For many of us who grew up in previous Yugoslavia this is a loss of another link with our past - even though Furlan has moved away and later made quite a nice career in US, we will always remember her as one of the biggest and most dependable stars in theatre, TV and in the movies. And of course, there is this shameful fact that her own homeland once treated her like an traitor and made her leave.
Like many of us who grew up in 1980s, the first time I have seen Mira Furlan was in a now-classic TV series "Velo Misto" which was a wonderfully picturesque saga about coastal city of Split between two world wars - looking back in retrospective, it was very, very ambitious attempt to present people in different levels of society (from a city mayor to a barber, fruit seller and peasant) and the huge cast was just unbelievably strong; it really feels like Who's who in our acting world - amongst all these people, Furlan was a strong-minded girlfriend of a famous football coach and this is how the nation first got to know her, as Kate with her voluptuous "balloons". That first chapter when Furlan appeared in every single local movie made, had also embarrassing distinction of directors getting her naked all of the time - I do remember being very young and aware that our movie directors just love to undress, rape and humiliate the actresses, it was like a constant leitmotif in our homegrown cinematography and young Furlan accepted it because she thought this is how things are. Much later in life she would look back and discuss this treatment from a different perspective and how US directors treated her completely differently.
Huge celebrity that she was, Furlan still couldn't escape the scars of politics and war: herself a child of mixed parentage and raised as someone above nationalism, she was married to a Serbian theatre director husband and they continued working on a theatre play in Belgrade even as the war started - at the time when both sides were obsessed with national purity, patriotism and "ours against theirs" Furlan found herself being a public scapegoat for not accepting this. Firm believer that art is above nationalism, she tried to continue with her theatre work just to find herself fired from her own theatre in Zagreb (where she was one of the brighter stars), crucified in the media, threatened on every step and finally during her absence the city punished her by taking away her own apartment (inherited from grandparents). I still don't know what is worse, the spiteful, shameful threats or a silence of majority who approved of this. I do remember reading about this in a newspapers and saying out loud to my girlfriend "but I agree with her, what's with this frenzied nationalism?" just to have her say "yes it is truth, but its not the right time to say this out loud now" - that was the moment when I realised that I don't want to stay there anymore.
Furlan and her husband packed their bags and moved to L.A. where she started from the bottom as a foreigner - miraculously, she did find success in TV series ("Lost" and "Babylon 5") and by this point her homeland had to begrudgingly accept that she is not defeated but in fact continued to prosper elsewhere. Somewhere around this time I started following the essays she wrote for newspaper "Feral Tribune" and personally this is my biggest connection with Mira Furlan as I genuinely enjoyed what she had to say from her perspective as a actress immigrant - her musings how the person changes when accepting foreign language, the humiliating experiences with auditions and how to survive them, the bizarre obsessions with the status, money and wealth, the realisation that illusions about US are not at all what they seemed from a distance, etc. Years later it was all collected in a book "Total wholesale" that I had to buy in Belgrade because Croatia would not publish it. To this day I absolutely love reading old interviews with her and find her thoughts fascinating and inspiring. She did returned to Croatian theatre to play mythical Medea but found the media attention incessant and distracting - upon the news of her death, this country is now praising her as one of the biggest actresses we ever had, but deep inside I know she was never accepted and the shame of her treatment is not genuine.
She was my neighbour - I don't think that I ever saw her, but I knew the street where she lived and I remember thinking that I should maybe send her a nice postcard with warm wishes, just to show her that not everybody in this town is a foaming mouth maniac. I never did and now I regret that I haven't done it, she might have appreciate it.
https://www.lilith.org/2016/09/the-unregretted-decisions-of-actor-mira-furlan/
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