Our social environment was too small for her, and it gave her very little. Luckily for us, in spite of everything, Mia Oremović starred in some of the most important films of Croatian cinema…
Recently during a visit to Belgrade, by coincidence I saw the ten-minute film Domovina, made sometime between 1942 and 1943 and produced by Hrvatski Slikopis. In this patriotic postcard based on the well-known poem by Đuro Arnold, young actress Mia Oremović had her first film role. She had just graduated from the academy, having studied under Branko Gavella, and even though she only read Arnold’s verses, her voice was quite impressive. It is because of her pleasant voice that she was engaged at the State Radio Station in Zagreb and even young school students knew her and fell in love with the beautiful brunette, whom they saw briefly in passing through the city centre. The popular radio host and actress suddenly became unpopular in 1945 when the new government arrived to Zagreb. She was sent to Split as penance and on one occasion she quite humorously told the story of how when she arrived to Split, she realized there would be no work for her as the situation was chaotic, so she packed her bags and hitch-hiked back to Zagreb.
Can you imagine the scene when a coquettish actress tries to stop a truck and talks to the truck drivers! Her sins were soon forgotten in Zagreb and she was even hired by the National Theatre because it suddenly lacked its leading actors, who had been transferred to the Yugoslav Drama Theatre in Belgrade. However, Mia was not very happy there either, and she could not wait for 1953, when Gavella invited her to the newly established Zagreb Drama Theatre (today Gavella Theatre), a smaller but much more creative theatre on Frankopanska Street.
Why was she not immediately hired to act in films, as well? She was not fit for the roles as a country girl (Živjeće ovaj narod) or a member of the League of Young Communists who went astray (Plavi 9), (in the film Zastava she just passed in front of the camera), but Vatroslav Mimica was right to cast her in his film U oluji, Mediterranean melodrama with elements of a thriller. At that time she was already 33 and was supposed to radiate an erotic aura, as well as seem reverent (she played a widow who falls in love with her missing husband’s brother), which was a task she completed more than suggestively. The only problem was that the film did not achieve much in the way of success (even though today it has its fans) so she was not offered many more roles after that.
She was close to forty when Nikola Tanhofer offered her the role of a lustful provincial woman in his debut film It Was Not Useless. In the film, Mia wants to get in the new doctor’ s bed (played by Boris Buzančić) but unfortunately he already has a wife and is in love with a neighborhood girl. That was the Mia we knew: full of self-confidence, seductive and aware that men need to be played with.
She brought this archetype to a new level of perfection in Tanhofer’s next film H-8, in which she starred as the wife of a rich Swiss man (Rudolf Kukić), who with her skillful leg play elicits many a lustful sigh from travelers on the bus, especially the young photographer Antun Vrdoljak. For this role she won the award as Best Supporting Actress in Pula, and she may have been consoled by the fact that the award for Best Actress was not granted to anyone that year.
In our cinema, such plumb roles are few and far between, and because of her manner she did not fit well in Bosnian or Serbian films. So she acted in the theatre (one of her most important roles was as Blanche Dubois in The Streetcar Named Desire) and occasionally on television, until Krešo Golik offered her the finest role of her career in his come-back film, after thirteen years of absence from Croatian cinema, I Have Two Mothers and Two Fathers. By then she was already in her fifties and coquettishness was out of the question, so she played a woman faced with a failed life who supports her unsuccessful husband and takes care of the children.
She won the Golden Arena in Pula and then made some bad decisions, such as resigning from the theatre to become a freelancer. After the first season, she left the play Exercises in Style, and was replaced by Lela Margitić. As a consolation, she starred in Golik’s other legendary film, One Song a Day Takes Mischief Away, as the comically tragic spinster Mina, wherein she gave what was probably one of the most refined acting performances in the history of Croatian cinema. When you read about what she thought this character should be like and how she explained her, it becomes evident that Mia was an exceptional actress.
Even though few of her later roles can be compared with what she had achieved earlier in her career – mainly because she was mostly offered smaller roles - it is fascinating how eager she was to act. Quite bizarre is the episode when she was interviewed for a TV show Evergreen and then censored because she left the impression of suffering from some kind of paranoia, which puts her right alongside charismatic and eccentric characters from Hollywood. Our social environment was too small for her, and it gave her very little. Luckily for us, in spite of everything Mia Oremović starred in some of the most important films of Croatian cinema, so the memory of her will last forever. (Nenad Polimac, Jutarnji list)