The memoir Love Me More than Anything in the World, by the late Mira Furlan, the Yugoslav-born star of Babylon 5 and Lost, has been published for the first time in English.

Mira Furlan (7th September 1955 – 20th January 2021) was a leading actress of theatre, film and TV in the former Yugoslavia. She starred or co-starred in over 25 films, most notably in Emir Kusturica’s Palme d’Ore winning and Oscar-nominated film When Father Was Away On Business (2000). She appeared regularly on Yugoslav Television, playing leading roles in numerous series and TV-films. She also received all the highest awards in her former country, both for her stage and film work, including two Golden Arenas (Yugoslavia’s equivalent to an Oscar) for Best Actress. She authored the play Until Death Do Us Part (Dok nas smrt ne razdvoji).

Mira Furlan emigrated to the United States with her husband in November 1991, due to the intolerable political circumstances in her homeland. She continued to successfully build up her career as an actress, and is best known for her parts in Warner Brothers television series Babylon 5 and ABC’s Lost. She taught Dramatic Literature at The New York Film Academy in New York.

Already one of the bestselling books in 2022 in Croatia, as Voli me vise od svega na svijetu, and Serbia, as Totalna rasprodaja, Love Me More than Anything in the World is an autobiographical work telling the story of Furlan’s remarkable life and creatively acclaimed career – along with the poignant and terrifying account of how her principled stand against the ethnic carnage that tore Yugoslavia apart in 1991 led her to leave the country with her husband, the director Goran Gajic. 

Before leaving, Furlan wrote “A letter to my co-citizens,” considered by many to be one of the most powerful anti-war essays of the last century and a historic document of the situation of an artist in a war. It was published in the newspapers on both warring sides of the conflict.

In that piece, Furlan wrote, “I know and I feel that it is my duty, the duty of our profession, to build bridges. To never give up on cooperation and community. Not the national community. The professional community. The human community. And even when things are at their very worst, as they are now, we must insist to our last breath on building and sustaining bonds between people. This is how we pledge to the future. And one day it will come.”

A fierce media campaign against her continued, leading to her being fired by the Croatian National Theatre. Her main “sin” was starring at the Belgrade International Theater Festival, where the antiwar production of Theatrical Illusions (Corneille) was chosen to be in the main competition of the festival. She had been performing the play for a year prior to the outbreak of the war.

Furlan begins her book with the history of her family in Yugoslavia, a country that no longer exists. Part Jewish, part Croatian, Furlan grew up never feeling the strong pull of ethnic nationalism that lurked beneath the surface of the communist society. Born in 1955 in Zagreb and recognized early on for her extraordinary talent, Furlan achieved fame as a star of film, TV, and the stage across all of Yugoslavia by the late seventies. 

Furlan and Gajic emigrated to the United States, settling in New York City and starting a hard immigrant life. After a rough adjustment, Furlan was cast in the cult science fiction television series, Babylon 5, and later appeared in Lost and many other television shows and stage productions in Los Angeles. 

Furlan explained that she conceived the book as a letter to her son, saying, “He is the one to whom I want to tell this story: the story of his parents and their tortured country, the story of a life that had been torn apart by uncontrollable forces, the story of a continual search for identity, purpose and direction in difficult circumstances, the story of emigrating to a foreign place, of lives being torn into pieces, of fragile nature of friendship and love, of heartbreaking losses, of new beginnings, of expectations and disappointments, of America through a lens of a foreigner, of a woman’s experience in the acting profession practiced on two continents, of the fleeting nature of fame.”

“Am I writing this book for you?” she goes on. “So that you can understand what came before you? So that you can get a glimpse into a distant, long-gone world that your parents came from? Do you even want to know about it? Do you need that heavy baggage, the baggage that your mother keeps dragging through her life, without ever finding a way of putting it down, if only for a second? Or am I writing it for an anonymous American reader who has barely heard of me, let alone the country of my birth? Am I writing it as a warning? Am I trying to say: ‘I told you so?’ And do I want to add (without daring to say it out loud): ‘… but you didn’t listen?’ Or am I writing it for myself, to myself? Why? Is it to “understand myself better” by trying to detect the hidden “story” in the scattered, illogical, messy narrative of my life?” 

She then remarks, “And while I’ve been trying to answer these unanswerable questions, toiling over words in a language that is not mine (although I audaciously pretend it is), something very strange has happened: you have grown up. Not only that: America has become a different country, a country ominously similar to the place we once left in horror and despair. There is no doubt anymore that the forces that chased us out of our own homes have won a global victory. We fought those forces once. Now we feel tired. We are exhausted by repetition.”

And, strangely enough, this book has become a different book. It is no longer a book of memories of a distant place and a distant time. It is becoming something very different: a plea to America and the world. 

• Love me more than anything else in the world, published by Gajic & Furlan Enterprises, Inc., is available at Amazon.com and at mirafurlan.net/order-miras-autobiography – international orders accepted from the star’s site

John Freeman

The founder of downthetubes, which he established in 1998. John works as a comics and magazine editor, writer, and on promotional work for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He is currently editor of Star Trek Explorer, published by Titan – his third tour of duty on the title originally titled Star Trek Magazine.

Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine, Babylon 5 Magazine, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics. He has also edited several comic collections, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”.

He’s the writer of “Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies” for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs” with Dave Hailwood.

Categories: Books, downthetubes News, Other Worlds, Television

Tags: Babylon 5, Lost, Mira Furlan