“Mellow is my style”, said Bora Todorović, the „neurotic observer” of YU comedy as he liked to describe himself



Were it not for his more famous sister Mira Stupica, maybe he never would have become an actor. 'I have a younger brother', said Mira Todorović once to the director Jovan Konjović who was looking for a kid actor for his play. So at the age of eleven little Bora played his first role and he remembered later that he only appeared in one scene giving an apple to a woman. That is when he earned his nickname Čvoka (bump), by a bump on his forehead from a mosquito bite. When he was in the military is Skoplje he received a letter from his sister from Belgrade in which she asked: 'How about the Drama Academy?' In the fall of 1949, for his entrance exam to the Academy he prepared 'Bloody Fairy-Tale' by Desanka Maksimović and a part of Nušić’s 'Autobiography'. At the end of the second season he had spent in the Belgrade Drama Theatre, together with Mira Stupica and her husband Bojan, he moved to Zagreb, even though, as he put it himself, in their company he felt 'like a bone with the meat for soup'. Upon his return to Belgrade he accepted a position in the 'Atelier 212' as a substitute for a sick actor.

In parallel with working in theater, where he became Aleksandar Popović’s favorite actor and acted in almost all of his plays, he starred on film and appeared in probably the two best comedies of Yugoslav film - Ko to tamo peva and The Marathon Family (Maratonci trče počasni krug) – both directed by the unsurpassed Slobodan Šijan. In Maratonci he portrayed Đenka, owner of a provincial theater and avid film lover. After he gets incinerated in a crematorium while trying to fix it, Laki Topalović (Danilo Bata Stojković) comments his transformation into powder with maybe the most famous one-liner from the golden age of Serbian comedy: “What a fixer, kudos!”.

He often acted characters that were “likeable swindlers” and liars as well as naïve enthusiasts. In the damned topical Balkan Spy (Balkanski špijun) by Dušan Kovačević he acts as a tailor whose paranoid landlord, a former member of the Information Bureau, thinks that he is a wicked terrorist who wants to demolish the state. In Kusturica’s loud and hysterical piece that talks about deception of politics and heroism, in order to elaborate the well now phrase that history repeats itself first as a tragedy and then as a farce (Underground), for which Kovačević wrote the screenplay, Bora portrays an owner of a restaurant and a musician. In Montenegro by Dušan Makavejev he portrays a Yugoslav guest worker in Sweden who hangs around the exotic night club 'Zanzi-Bar', whose figure was later recycled in a Scandinavian crime drama in an obsessive search for criminals within the milieu of Serbian underground. After those roles, we cannot do anything but paraphrase Laki’s mythical one-liner: What an actor, kudos! (Dragan Rubeša)