Although the first and the last roles of this great actor’s career were in films, that part of his extremely rich career is usually only mentioned incidentally, even though he appeared onscreen about fifty times
 


Great actor Zlatko Crnković (Kastav, May 27, 1936 - Zagreb, February 14, 2012) played his last role (as a grandfather) in an interesting thriller The Dark (Mrak, 2011) by Dan Oki. He appeared on film for the first time in 1957 with a small role in Šime Šimatović’s Were're Going Separate Ways (Naši se putevi razilaze), even before he played on the stage of the Zagreb Croatian National Theatre in works by Moliere, Shakespeare and Brecht in 1958. There he gained a permanent engagement, although he was still a student of the Academy of Drama Arts. He remained faithful to that theatre throughout his working life, until his retirement in 2003, and in parallel performed in plays at the Dubrovnik Summer Festival and in the Split Summer Festival, Theatre & TD and other theaters, taking on more than one hundred and fifty stage roles of exceptional range, such as Horatio in Hamlet, Križovac in In Agony, Teacher in Acting Hamlet in the Village of Mrduša Donja, Ponzo in It is so (If you think so), Don Fernando in Cyclops and many others. Although he always preferred the theater and considered it an essential place for testing actors’ capabilities, his career was not limited only to the stage. As a freshman in 1955, he interpreted poetry on Radio Zagreb and quickly became one of our most respected interpreters, finding - as he himself once said – the roots of his acting procedure in poetry – “In the poetry I read I find a stimulus to investigate opportunities of sounding and flickering of my soul, because I think that it has to be the melody of a soul in my stage speech, it must be what you experience deep within yourself.”


Although he was born in the part of the country where people speak the chakavian dialect and he was educated speaking kajkavian dialect, through great effort and talent he became one of the best interpreters of the literary štokavian dialect and in 1959, immediately after graduation, in parallel with his acting career he began teaching stage speech at the Academy of Dramatic Arts. In retirement, he continued to teach at colleges in Osijek and Split, and thus his work as a pedagogue remains as highly respected as his achievements on the stage. Even though it sometimes appeared that the essential part of his great acting skills was his speech, as early as in 1974 he pointed at the many complex and diverse sources of his acting inspiration: “Achieve in yourself maturity and the ability to be interesting through simplicity of human declaration and expression in every appearance and readable in every detail: in pronouncement and gaze, in laughter and sigh, in cries and exultation, in a quiet and calm allocution, in the abundance of reflections that you use as formative material, and to which at the same time you serve… There are not too many more secrets in that path, but the secret remains (as in life itself) the right measure of choice of details, which make up a mosaic of your professional path.”


Although the first and the last role of this great actor’s career were film roles, that part of his extremely rich career is usually only mentioned incidentally, even though he appeared onscreen about fifty times. Indeed he himself lavished much more attention and love on the theater, but we should not ignore the fact that film directors rarely offered him significant roles, regarding him first and foremost as a theatre actor. It became evident how wrong that assumption was in 2003 when he won the Golden Arena in Pula for his leading role in Zrinko Ogresta’s omnibus Here (Tu). Even in his many supporting roles, such as in Timon by Tomislav Radić, Zlatko Crnković managed to portray a complex and compelling character and showed the layered modernist intertwining of theater and real life through the lens of the camera. (Tomislav Kurelec)