NOTED CROATIANS
CULTURE SPANNING THE CENTURIES: FROM THE CROATIAN ANDERSEN TO E.R. By Ben Hamilton
CREATIVITY
Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić
Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić
Branko Lustig
Ogulin native Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić (18741938) is Croatia’s answer to HC Andersen and often compared to him – so much so that she is often called ‘Croatian Andersen’. Married at 18, the mother of six and fourtime Nobel Prize for Literature nominee’s first noted children’s literature work was published in 1913, but it is probably for her 1916 work, ‘Croatian Tales of Long Ago’ (‘Priče iz davnine’), which she is best remembered and frequently compared to Andersen. Like the Dane’s work, her stories were original but rooted in folklore; she took names and motifs from the Slavic mythology her fellow Croats grew up with. A 1990 film adaptation of ‘The Marvellous Adventures and Misadventures of Hlapić the Apprentice’ is Croatia’s most popular ever movie at the cinema.
Just days from now, the collective Dolby audience at the Oscars will take a deep inhalation of breath when they realise one of their own passed away in November. Croatia double Oscar-winning producer Branko Lustig (1932-2019) won for ‘Gladiator’ and ‘Schindler’s List’ – a film that meant so much to him as he spent two years in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, and on the day of his liberation he weighed less than 30 kilos. Lustig produced several other films, including ‘American Gangster’, ‘Black Hawk Down’ and TV series ‘The Winds of War’.
Ivan Mestrović
How Meštrović imagined Adam
Described by Auguste Rodin as “the greatest phenomena among the sculptors” of his time, Croatian designer Ivan Mestrovic (1883-1962) was a brave, outspoken voice during a time of great change, whose career spanned six decades and almost as many continents. For a good example of the Vrpolje native’s work, check out ‘The Bowman’ and ‘The Spearman’, two outdoor bronze statues outside Congress Plaza in Chicago.
Oscar Nemon
Nemon up close with Queen Elizabeth II
10 CROATIA SUPPLEMENT
FILM & MUSIC
The career of Osijek native Oscar Nemon (1906-1985) really took off after he moved to Britain in the 1930s, eventually obtaining citizenship nine years later. As well as sculpting the British queen and most of her family, he also depicted two US presidents – Dwight D Eisenhower and Harry S Truman – and three British PMs: Harold Macmillan, Margaret Thatcher and, on more than a dozen occasions, Winston Churchill. Among his other famous subjects were Princess Marie Bonaparte, a great-grandniece of the emperor, Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, and Sigmund Freud and his dog Topsy.
Goran Višnjić Croatia’s answer to George Clooney is ER actor Goran Višnjić (born 1972). The Šibenik native’s character Dr Luka Kovač joined at the start of season six, just a handful of episodes after Clooney’s. Dark, tall and handsome, Višnjić helped alleviate the void, and he quickly became a female fans’ favourite, not least when he recited part of the ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy in Croatian. The scene had extra meaning to Višnjić as his big break came in 1994 when a fellow Croat dropped out of the part of Hamlet on opening night in Dubrovnik. It led
Rade Šerbedžija
to him landing a role in ‘Welcome to Sarajevo’ and stateside recognition. Outside of ER, Višnjić made the last four in the 2005 search for a new James Bond, and more recently he played inventor Nikola Tesla in ‘Doctor Who’.
Rade Šerbedžija Croatian actor Rade Šerbedžija played the wandmaker Gregorovitch in the seventh Harry Potter film, and also had a memorable role as Boris the Blade in ‘Snatch’. But he is perhaps best known for two TV roles: as Dmitri Gredenko, a renegade former Soviet general, in ‘24’, and as Prince Kuragin, a former lover of Dowager Countess Violet Crawley (Maggie Smith), in ‘Downton Abbey’.
Eurovision winners Croatia has never won Eurovision, but Zadar native Emilija Kokić and the five other Croat members of the band Riva did win the competition for Yugoslavia in 1989 with the song ‘Rock Me’. Eurovision 1990 was then held in Zagreb. Kokić, meanwhile, has never represented Croatia. The closest she came was finishing sixth in the national competition in 2008.