Mira Furlan: The Star Her Country Threw Away
In 1991 a Zagreb journalist published an article about the most admired actress in Croatia under the headline "The Hard Life of an Easy Woman." Her offences, as the piece and the campaign that followed defined them: she had refused to abandon a theatre production in Belgrade, and she was married to a Serb. Within months Mira Furlan had lost her job at the Croatian National Theatre, lost her family's apartment, and was receiving death threats. In November she and her husband left for New York. Thirty years later, on the day she died, the same theatre issued an apology.
An Intellectual Household in Zagreb
She was born on 7 September 1955 in Zagreb, then the capital of the Socialist Republic of Croatia inside Yugoslavia, into a family thick with university professors. Her mother, Branka Weil, was of Jewish-Serbian background; her father, Ivan Furlan, of Slovene-Croat descent. It was precisely the kind of mixed, cosmopolitan Yugoslav lineage that would become a liability the moment the country began sorting people by ethnicity. As a girl she was besotted with American rock and roll.
She took a Bachelor of Fine Arts in theatre at the Academy for Dramatic Arts in Zagreb, adding fluent English, German and French along the way — an unusual investment for an actress whose domestic career was already secure, and one that would later save it.
Yugoslavia's Leading Actress
Through the 1970s and 1980s Furlan worked constantly: the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb, television series including *Velo Misto* and *Smogovci*, and a run of films that made her a genuine star across all six republics. She took Golden Arena awards at the Pula Film Festival in 1982 and 1986. The peak was Emir Kusturica's *When Father Was Away on Business* (1985), which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film; she also appeared in *The Beauty of Vice* (1986), *In the Jaws of Life* and *Three for Happiness*.
She was not only an actress. She sang with the group Le Cinema and featured as a vocalist on the Slovenian rock band Buldožer's 1983 album. She was visible in the Yugoslav second-wave feminist movement of the 1980s, and she argued in public — a woman in a socialist celebrity culture who did not confine herself to her roles. Her colleague Rade Šerbedžija described her plainly as "a leftist and a socialist."
1991
When the Croatian War of Independence began, that biography became the charge sheet. Furlan declined to pull out of a Belgrade production; the Croatian National Theatre dismissed her. The journalist Rene Bakalović's article set off a smear campaign that carried an antisemitic undertow and made her marriage to the director Goran Gajić, an ethnic Serb, into proof of treachery. The apartment went. The threats came. Almost nobody in her profession defended her. Asked later who had disappointed her, she said the list "would be too long. Very few people stood by me," and singled out the actress Milena Dravić as one of the few who had not abandoned her. In November 1991 she and Gajić flew to New York.
Becoming Delenn
She joined the Actors Studio in 1992. A year later she was cast as Delenn, the Minbari ambassador, in J. Michael Straczynski's *Babylon 5*, and she played the part across all five seasons from 1993 to 1998 — one of the very few actors on the show present from first episode to last. Delenn was an unusually demanding assignment: a character who undergoes a physical transformation mid-series, played under heavy prosthetics, required to carry the show's spiritual and political weight in a second language, in a genre where the writing rarely rewards subtlety. Furlan gave her stillness and gravity, and she became the emotional centre of a series that ran on ideas.
From 2004 to 2010 she was Danielle Rousseau in ABC's *Lost*, the French scientist marooned on the island sixteen years before the crash — a recurring role that hovered between menace and grief and was, again, built almost entirely out of voice and restraint. She guest-starred in *NCIS* in 2009. She kept singing: a solo album, *Songs From Movies That Have Never Been Made*, in 1998, and *Trying to Forget* with The Be Five the same year.
The Return That Never Quite Happened
In 2002, after eleven years away, she went back to Croatia to play in Rade Šerbedžija's production of Euripides' *Medea*, and was received with acclaim — though colleagues observed that she never really returned. She kept writing, in Croatian and English: columns for *Feral Tribune*, collected in 2010 as *Totalna rasprodaja*; a play, *Until Death Do Us Part*, set in the Zagreb of the 1970s; and an autobiography written in English, *Love Me More than Anything in the World: Stories about Belonging*, which folds her exile into the larger story of a country dismantling itself. She won a Balkan New Film Festival jury award for best actress for *The Abandoned* in 2010.
Why Mira Is Called a Genius
Her gift was craft, and it should be described as craft rather than dressed up as intellect. Furlan could hold an audience with almost nothing — the face immobilised by latex, the language not her own, the dialogue frequently expository — and she did it by exact control of voice, tempo and stillness. Straczynski, who wrote most of *Babylon 5* himself and had five years to form a view, called her "a stunningly talented performer." The technical achievement in Delenn is specific: she had to make a character who literally changes species remain recognisably one person, and she had to do it in English, having learned the language in a Zagreb classroom rather than at home. The same skill is visible in Rousseau, a part composed of paranoia and buried maternal loss and delivered in a French accent for an American network.
There is also a rarer quality, harder to name, that belongs to her life rather than her technique: an obstinate refusal to accept the ethnic sorting that engulfed her country. Keeping a Belgrade contract in 1991 was not a career move; it cost her everything she had built and forced her to rebuild from nothing at thirty-six in a foreign industry and a foreign language. That is moral clarity under maximum pressure, which is not the same thing as genius but is scarcer.
The counter-case is honest and simple. No critic of standing has called her a genius, and her international fame rests on two genre television roles rather than on the work — in Kusturica, on the Zagreb stage — that was her best. The most substantial part of her career was made in a country that no longer exists, in films most of her English-speaking admirers have never seen. She was a superb actress with an unusually principled life, and the case for her rests on both halves of that sentence.
Legacy
She died at her Los Angeles home on 20 January 2021, aged sixty-five, of complications from West Nile fever, survived by Gajić and their son Marko Lav, born in 1998. Her death set off a bout of public reckoning across the former Yugoslavia. The Croatian National Theatre, whose first statement had glossed over what it did to her, apologised; the drama director Ivica Buljan said publicly, "I feel shame due to the events that forced Mira Furlan to leave." The weekly *Globus* apologised for publishing the pieces that had fuelled the campaign. It arrived thirty years late, and she never saw it — but the apology is now part of the record, which is more than most exiles get.
Achievements
- Educated at Academy of Dramatic Art
- Worked as actor, stage actor and film actor
