In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Olivera Marković was equally popular in Zagreb and Belgrade. The reason behind this was her opus of films and music recordings
On the occasion of Olivera Marković’s death, the article in the Belgrade “Evening News” focused primarily on her career in theatre. At one point, in the same newspaper, she had placed a high fifth place on the list of best Serbian actresses of all time. Nevertheless, theatre is an awkward kind of art. Unless one lives in the city where an actor regularly performs, it is hard to verify the rumors about his or her greatness. Nevertheless, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Olivera Marković was equally popular in Zagreb and Belgrade. The reason behind it was her films and music records. She was Veljko Bulajić’s favorite actress and acted in three of his best films from that time: Train Without a Timetable (Vlak bez voznog reda), Uzavreli grad (The First Fires) and Kozara. No Sunday radio show for musical requests at the Radio Zagreb could be imagined without one of her interpretations of the Russian romance “Troika”. At the time she had a contract with musical company “Jugoton” from Zagreb and there was no chance you could easily get your hands on her LP with four songs, including the above-mentioned evergreen. When she had concerts in Zagreb, the tickets would immediately be sold out. It was hard to estimate whether she was more adored as an actress or a singer; you can check how she sang on Youtube, where there are several recordings of her performances.
Olivera Marković was born on May 3, 1925 in Belgrade but spent her childhood in Niš, and by early childhood she had her own acting troupe in Niška Banja. After graduating from high school, her family moved back to Belgrade where she first enrolled in art history studies and then decided on acting, most likely thanks to her small role in the film U planinama Jugoslavije, which was the first post-war film production in Yugoslavia, directed by the famous Russian director Abram Room (during the filming he did not move from Opatija). She applied to the Belgrade Academy and ended up in actor/director Mate Milošević’s class. With her husband, Red Marković (she kept his last name all her life, her maiden last name was Đorđević) she was a member of the Belgrade Drama Theatre, which insisted on modernism in theatre, so together they challenged the socialist-realist cannons by putting up plays by Tennessee Williams, William Inge and other American dramatists. In the mid-1950s, at the same time as Ljubica Mikuličić and Boris Buzančić in Zagreb, the Marković couple gave brilliant performances for Cat on the Hot Tin Roof in Belgrade. Olivera’s interpretation of Maggie was considered to be the most erotic performance on the Belgrade stage of that time. She often played the role of a femme fatale on film as well, which is unsurprising: she was already in her thirties and did not fit in the stereotype of a proper sex-bomb, but the attractive, full-breasted brunette, with brilliant diction and a vast acting range could easily parry her male partners. The camera loved her, so she acted in one film after another: her first larger roles were in the war drama by Vojo Nanović Šolaja (1955) and the thriller by Žika Mitrović Posljednji kolosijek (1956). Nevertheless, it first became really obvious what a great actress she was in the excellent melodrama by Branko Bauer Samo ljudi (Men Only, 1957), in which she played Lula from Belgrade who, together with the hostess of the bed and breakfast in snowed-in Bosnia (played by the equally impressive Nela Eržišnik), fights for Nikša Štefanini’s affection. Such an appearance could not pass up unnoticed and the youngish debutant Veljko Bulajić, who was just working on his ambitious debut film Vlak bez voznog reda (Train Without a Timetable, 1959), starring an amazing parade of the most interesting Croatian, Serbian and Bosnian actors, hired her next. Olivera Marković easily stood out in her role of a widow Ika who drives crazy Ivica Pajer, a new idol of audiences who had a good chance at an international career ahead of him. Her next collaboration with Bulajić on u Uzavreli grad (The First Fires, 1961) secured her probably the best role of her career, the prostitute Riba who as a punishment gets sent to Zenica to build blast furnaces. In domestic films such roles were not considered appropriate and it was especially provocative because Olivera played Riba as a self-confident woman with modern opinions who would have gladly stuck with one man but somehow could never succeed at it. In that film she had a few scenes with Bata Živojinović who played an incorrigible womanizer but in Bulajić’s Kozara (1962) they played a married couple of Bosnian peasants who run away from Ustashas and the Germans. The scene of their death, when the son covers her with leaves unaware that she is in fact dead and says: “Mother is sleeping”, left not a single dry eye in the theater.
In the first half of 1960s, Olivera was at her peak. When the famous Polish director Andrzej Wajda arrived to Yugoslavia to direct the film Sibirska lady Macbeth (1962), based on Nikolai Leskov’s novel, he gave her the role of Katarina Izmajlova. Her partners were Ljuba Tadić and the legendary director Bojan Stupica, and even though the international success of the film was quite small (she merely won the Silver Arena in Pula), it was not a small thing to put down Wajda in her filmography. Soon she received her first Golden Arena for her role in the well-done social drama by Fadil Hadžić Službeni položaj (1964), similar to Bauer’s film Licem u lice (Face to Face). Even though she had had better roles before, she was appropriately authoritative as a worker who pointed to the director how badly the company stands.
In the meantime, her marriage to Marković failed and she married again, an actor for the second time, to Dušan Bulajić (Ljubav i moda, Kota 905 (Point 905)) who turned out to be her ideal partner. They stayed together until his death in 1995. She also changed her theatre, beginning in 1967 she played in the National Theatre in Belgrade, from which she retired in 1989 but continued to act on film and television, as well as theatre. Due to poor health, she spent her last few years in intensive care.
After she turned forty, leading roles became fewer but supporting ones and character roles were many. For one of them she won another Golden Arena (in the war comedy by Branko Baletić Balkan ekspres from 1983), but her most interesting roles were in her son Goran Marković’s films. She starred in many of his films, but two roles stand out particularly. In the comedy Tito i ja (Tito and Me, 1992) she played the young hero’s grandmother who could not hide her contempt for her ex-husband, a faded bon vivant, who without a fail appears at the time of lunch every day. And he was played by - Rade Marković! In the documentary Srbija godine nulte (Serbia, Year Zero, 2001) she played herself, a mother worried because her son Goran is obsessed with his weight and does not enjoy his mother’s cooking. That role was perhaps the hardest because she knew it was reality and not fiction. (Nenad Polimac, Jutarnji list)