Thanks to his urbane appearance he was often successfully cast as an urban hero, but he also looked great in a uniform, and so he was always completely booked up for both film and television roles



In Slobodan Šijan’s film Kako sam sistematski uništen od idiota (How I Was Systematically Destroyed by an Idiot), a Belgrade bum, Babi Pupuška, finds his unfaithful lover in the bed of a formerly popular actor Siniše, who is now a notorious alcoholic who does not even get up from his bed to go to the toilet. While washing him in the near-by river, Babi babbles to him with scorn: “Come on, cinema of ours, hold on!”

That evening they watch a film from Siniša’s youth on television. Siniša has no patience for it and soon falls asleep drunk. In the morning, he faces the ultimate humiliation: the police arrive, arrest him and seal up his apartment because the day before he stole a TV so he could see himself on it.

Rade Marković played the role of Siniša with great pleasure and gave the film something more: a memory of his debut appearance in Besmrtnoj mladosti (Immortal Youth) from 1948, a melodrama about the problems of illegal people in the occupied Belgrade. While the camera shifts from the old to the young Rade on the TV, in spite of the obvious message that time is an unmerciful executioner, the viewer cannot help thinking that this ruin of a man does not look so bad. “Look at this face!”, says Siniša to Babi and indeed, he has something to show. At sixty-two Rade Marković looked better than many of his younger colleagues. He had a good sense of humor when he agreed to play this part, which seems to make fun of a part of his own career. His alibi is Siniša’s complaint about how an actor always accepts roles he is given, no matter if it is as a Partisan or a Chetnik.

With much humor he played the role in his son, Goran Marković’s film Tito i ja (Tito and Me), made a decade later. He played the grandfather of the young protagonist, a well-groomed older man with a bow tie, with a rather thick skin, who is unfazed by his family’s complaints that he always appears in his ex-wife’s house at lunch time. She is played by the director’s mother, Olivera Marković, to whom Rade was married in real life as well.

Unlike characters from the two above mentioned films, Rade never allowed himself to depend on other people’s kindness. He was a workaholic. Handsome and with a pleasant voice, alreadyby the late 1940s he had already become a star, mainly thanks to his role in the fairy tale Čudotvorni mač (The Magic Sword) by Vojislav Nanović.

His work in the theatre, as a member of the Belgrade Drama theatre, along with his preference for modernism, was probably a “go” signal to the film directors who offered him more and more interesting roles (Daleko je sunce, Šolaja, Zenica, Tuđa zemlja, Radopolje and Hasanaginica are his peaks), and only chance prevented him from having an international career.

In the late 1950s, he played in the Czech comedy Tri prání directed by Kadár and Klos, who later went on to become Oscar winners, and the Bulgarian The Peach-Garden Trespasser (Kradetzat na praskovi) was one of the great successes of East European film from mid 1960s. Thanks to his urbane appearance he was often successfully cast as an urban hero, but he also looked great in a uniform and so he was always totally booked up for both film and television roles. How he managed to synchronize his many roles on the screen with his theatre career is quite an unbelievable phenomenon.

He often played in Croatian films, (we also recently saw him in a episode of the TV series Nepokoreni grad, playing a German officer), so it is quite a shame we had to find out about his death from Belgrade when he died at the Cardiology department of the General Hospital in Zabok, (he liked spending time on the nearby Klanjec with his second wife Lidija).

He found himself in the typical situation of an artist who has died in the wrong place. Some Serbian papers did not report at all about where he died, others did not know how to spell Zabok and ours quite inappropriately summarized his career. It would have been better if both had simply written that an acting legend had passed away and let everyone find other relevant information as they pleased. (Nenad Polimac, Jutarnji list)