"Beautiful Milena Dravic!

Anyone who is interested in what kind of films they watched in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists, could start that research by watching films in which Milena Dravic played.

She was born in Belgrade, in Dorćol in 1940, she went to ballet school and dreamed of becoming a ballerina.

František Čap's first film The Door Remains Open, a story that follows the experiences of young people in post-war Yugoslavia, was made while she was going to high school.

The redundant Branko Bauer opened the door to the world of acting in 1962, and for the role of Ranka she was awarded the Golden Arena and thus became the youngest winner of this award.

She gained popularity in the great partisan films directed by Veljko Bulajić - she was Milja in Kozara (1962), Nada Tifusarka in the Battle of the Neretva (1969) and Vera in Sutjeska (1973).

She has also starred in some of the most significant black wave films that have had a great reception at world festivals and influenced generations of younger filmmakers.

With Puriš Đorđević, when she was briefly married, she recorded, among other things, Djevojka (1965) and Jutro (1967), which was shown at the Venice Film Festival.

The current film bans did not bypass her at that time either.

Bahrudin Bata Čengić's film The Role of My Family in the World Revolution, based on the novel of the same name by Bora Ćosić, ended "in a bunker" after its premiere at the Pula Film Festival in 1971.

The censors at the time were shocked by the scene in which Milena Dravic presents a cake with Stalin's head, and the actors, after eating their whipped cream hair, start to sweeten the brains of the Russian communist leader.

A similar fate befell W.R. Mysteries of the organism by Dušan Makavejev, a film of experimental structure that deals with the relationship between communist ideology and sexuality, as well as the theories of the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich.Although he delighted critics at the Cannes Film Festival, the film was only shown in Yugoslav cinemas in the 1980s.

Milena Dravic plays a young communist and hairdresser, who refuses to court a worker because she is in love with figure skating champion Vladimir Ilyich.

Goran Radovanović made the documentary The Case of Makavejev, which was shown in 2019, about the discussion of the commission that decided whether the film would be shown in front of the audience.

The Yugoslav press of that time wrote about the praise that Milena received for this film from Jack Nicholson and ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev, when she adored her.

Milena has played a number of different roles, many of which are important to the history of cinema.

She charmed Alfred Hitchcock and Miloš Forman, and for newer generations it will mean that she played in the first film in which Brad Pitt had the main role of Božidar Nikolić 's Dark Side of the Sun from 1988.

Yet colleagues - both contemporaries and younger ones - remember her as a modest and withdrawn person.

She increased her huge popularity in the seventies by participating in the television show Obraz uz obraz by Zdravko Šotra.

In this way, the famous film couple, Milena Dravic and Dragan Nikolic, became part of every Yugoslav household.

Theatrical audiences remember the roles in The Miracle in Shargan, Decameron 81 (directed by the famous Italian director Robert Giuli), Kir Janja and the Urban Tragedy. The role of the manager of the Katarina Theater in the play Larry Thompson - the tragedy of one of Dušan Kovačević's youth was played more than 300 times on the stage of the Zvezdara Theater.

She also worked for children: she shot a series of lullabies Good Night, Children based on the text by Duško Radović in 1963, and the role of a teacher in Stories from Nepričava and a neighbor in Metla without a handle is remembered.

She played one of the last roles in the children's film Aga and Emma, ​​directed by Milutin Petrović.

She welcomed the beginning of the war, in which her homeland disappeared, in New York, where she performed the play Milena in the World of Men based on the text by Duško Radović.

She didn’t do much in the 1990s, and believes she experienced some sort of ban on state television for supporting the 1996/97 student protest, so her old films haven’t been shown to a wider audience for a long time.

After the democratic changes in Serbia in 2000, the film was returned by young directors.

SEVERE PAIN With the departure of her husband, the Yugoslav film giant lost her love, support and everything that, as she once said, made her life wonderful in 44 years of marriage.

She died on October 14, 2018, a year and a half after the death of her husband, the great Serbian and Yugoslav actor Dragan Nikolić.

She was buried in the Alley of the Greats in Belgrade, next to her husband Dragan Nikolić.