While Šerbedžija was more popular, he was more gifted. He had a talent for portraying marginal characters, a trait so familiar to the Croatian cultural milieu…



In the late 1970s, great Serbian director Živojin Pavlović revealed the circumstances under which he hired Ivica Vidović for his film Zaseda: “I could not believe what an actor he was…”. His producer, Centar Film, had just finished collaborating with a Croatian partner on Antun Vrdoljak’s debut There Grows a Green Pine in the Woods (U gori raste zelen bor) and Pavlović had the opportunity to see its “rough cut”. In that film, Ivica starred as a young Muslim who fights for the Ustashas until he gets captured by the Partisans. He was so spontaneous in his portrayal of a normally self-confident young man who is completely lost in the chaos of war, that he overshadowed his excellent and experienced partners Pavle Vuisić and Boris Dvornik.

Pavlović needed the young actor for the role of a young Communist full of ideals who becomes disillusioned with the pronounced Stalinization of the Partisan movement. In order to make the character even more convincing, the director decided that the character was originally from Split but ended up in Serbia during the war, where he fights against the remnants of Tchetniks’ troupes. Vidović did an excellent job with his role in a film in which some shots lasted six to seven minutes; it was not an easy task to compete with the director’s choreography but he proved that he was more than up to it.

At the end of the 1960s and beginning of the 1970s, Rade Šerbedžija had already established himself as the next big star of domestic cinema. Nevertheless, Ivica Vidović was slightly more impressive.

At the time it was hard to get a seat for the play Kaspar, written by Peter Handke and directed by Vladimir Gerić, in which Vidović electrified audiences for a full two hours. Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guilderstern Are Dead, in which he brilliantly competed with Šerbedžija, was an even greater success.

Dušan Makavejev, then the hottest name in Yugoslavian cinema, colored Vidović’s hair blond and gave him the role of a Soviet skating champion in the provocative political collage W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism (W. R.: Misterije organizma). The film was hidden away in a bunker in its home country, but travelled the world and became a modernist classic. Vidović portrayed a completely different character from the hurt young men in Vrdoljak and Pavlović’s films; he starred as an idealized Russian Superman intrigued by a Yugoslav sexual revolutionary.

In the popular TV series Naše malo misto, he further developed his array of characters by portraying the neighborhood weirdo Servantes. Soon afterwards, he played a similar character in Krsto Papić’s Handcuffs (Lisice). These two were sort of counterparts to the characters that became his trademark in the following decades: they are ambitious heroes who believe that reason and honesty are sufficient guidelines in life, which usually ends with their defeat (Papić’s Izbavitelj), and when it happens, they become marginalized such as Servantes or later the Poet in Brešan’s tragic comedy How the War Started on My Island (Kako je počeo rat na mom otoku).

Vidović’s talent for portraying marginal characters, a trait so close to the Croatian cultural climate, inspired Zoran Tadić, one of the most important domestic directors, who often said that his own position was “in the corner, in no one’s way”, to select him as one of his favorite actors. Vidović did not give in to affectation when portraying such characters: he seemed truly surprised that no one else shared his opinions, he knew how to react against an obvious injustice, but ended up “in the corner” because he did not have chameleon-like social abilities. Tadić’s and Vidović’s first collaboration in Ritam zločina resulted with one of the most important films of Croatian cinema.

In the early 1990s, Vidović’s wife, actress Gordana Gadžić was unemployed. They met on the set of Tadić’s A Man Who Liked Funerals (Čovjek koji je volio sprovode), and she moved to Zagreb from Belgrade. In order for both of them to work, they went on tour with the play Ay Carmela by the Spanish author José Sanchis Sinisterro, a story about a theatre troupe that plays for both sides: Franco’s soldiers and then the Republicans. The play was a direct commentary on the current political situation but no avid patriots attacked them.

Afterwards, Vidović starred in Papić’s comedy When the Dead Start Singing (Kad mrtvi zapjevaju), opposite Ivo Gregurević, and there is a scene in which they are running in between two enemies’ fire. When somebody establishes himself as such a fine actor as Vidović, similar scenes occur all by themselves. That is why his role in How the War Started on My Island, in which he is the only casualty of the quarrel between the Yugoslav Army’s officer and local patriots, became such a hit.

Vidović received much recognition throughout his career, but the most important of all is this: just count all the important films, TV series and theatre plays in which he starred and what you will get is sort of a “best of” of our cultural scene. (Nenad Polimac, Jutarnji list)