Mira Furlan

Mira Furlan — Biography

To American audiences Mira Furlan was Ambassador Delenn on Babylon 5 and Danielle Rousseau on Lost; to audiences in the country she left she had already been a star for a decade. Trained in the national theatre scene of the former Yugoslavia, she took the Golden Arena for acting twice at Pula and reached an international audience through Emir Kusturica's Cannes winner When Father Was Away on Business.

That first career ended in 1991. With the wars beginning, she and her husband, the director Goran Gajić, left for the United States, and the departure was treated at home as desertion: she was denounced as a traitor to the nation, and her Zagreb apartment was taken from her — a claim she pursued through the courts for seventeen years. Their son Marko Lav was born in 1998. Alongside the television work she appeared in Cirkus Columbia and The Abandoned, published a volume of essays in 2010, and later wrote an autobiography in English. She was 65 when she died in Los Angeles on 20 January 2021, of complications of West Nile fever. She was born in Zagreb on 7 September 1955.