Mira Furlan, the actress who was best known for her roles as Delenn on Babylon 5 and Danielle Rousseau on Lost, died on Wednesday, January 20. The news was confirmed by a message posted on her Twitter account, followed by a heartfelt tribute from Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski. “It is a night of great sadness, for our friend and comrade had gone down the road where we cannot reach her,” the creator tweeted. “But as with all things, we will catch up with her in time, and I believe she will have many stories to tell us, and many new roles to share with the universe.” An official cause of death has not been revealed, but the creator and some of her colleagues have alluded to a history of “failing health.” She was 65.
Furlan was born in Zagreb, Croatia (formerly of Yugoslavia), where she nurtured her passion for acting through a number of stage, television and film. She played Ankica Vidmar in the film When Father Was Away on Business, which won the Palme d’Or at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. After working in the Croatian film industry for years, the actress moved to New York in 1992 in order to escape civil unrest in Yugoslavia. There, she joined the Actors Studio, sparking a bicoastal U.S. stage career that allowed her to sharpen her skills in both NYC and Los Angeles. Furlan soon auditioned for a role in Babylon 5. Impressed by her courageous spirit and devotion to the craft, Straczynski tapped her to play the part of Minbari Ambassador Delenn for all five seasons of the popular sci-fi drama.
In the years between her time on Babylon 5 and her stint on Lost, Furlan maintained an international screen career, appearing in both American and European television, including some voice work in Spider-Man: The Animated Series, where she played mercenary Silver Sable. Outside of film and TV, Furlan had a humble presence in the video game industry, appearing in the likes of Payday 2, Uncharted 4, and Mafia: Definitive Edition. But as her colleagues note, Furlan will be mostly be remembered as a person with a kind, fiery spirit and an abiding love for honest, resonant artistry. She is survived by her husband, Gajić, and their son, Marko Lav Gajić.
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Delenn is one of my favorite characters of all time. A film critic friend of mine recommends the Yugoslavian film “The Beauty of Vice” with her in the lead. It’s on Amazon Prime in Germany, so I will watch that over the weekend.
There’s not many who could square off against Benjamin Linus and Jack the Ripper, but Furlan did both with aplomb.
And Ben Linus ended up falling in love with her! And understandably so
We don’t know that Jack the Ripper didnt.
RIPLast night, I randomly decided to watch one of my favorite scenes, Delenn’s badass moment when saving Babylon 5.
Exactly what i came here to post. Great scene.
That scene was so unexpected because she is part of the religious caste.
Yeah but by that point in the series she had already started to realize that the whole caste system was kinda shit anyways and that the warrior caste was full of assholes.
I also kind of liked the point that the religious caste could be full of dangerous zealots too.
There are still moments of B5 that still feel as exciting and as vibrant as their first watch. This was one of them (I’d also add Vir’s reply to Morden to the list, G’Kar refusing to help save Londo in the lift… but how many of them feature someone who has passed away??!?)
And Ivanova’s reply to the Warlock class fleet – she is still with us.
Too many in the case of Babylon 5. We have lost a lot of the cast
I literally just last week finished watching all 5 seasons of B5 for the first time. And you’re right, some of it holds up very well. And even the hokey parts are still less hokey than your average ST:TNG episode.
Rewatching as a modern viewer, I think it feels like a transition point between the heavily episodic monster of the week type shows, and the entirely serialised shows like The Expanse or Game Of Thrones. There are parts that definitely feel of it’s time – there is a tremendous episode Confessions And Lamentations that was more or less self contained that in a modern show would play out over a few episodes as a mix of A & B stories (the quarantine period would be an A story, build up and aftermath maybe more of a B story for a week). I still remember being stunned as they really did wipe out a whole race, but the story still having reasonance as being both about religion’s capacity for inspiring compassion and generosity, and for inspiring ignorance.
For me that compares better to DS9 and BSG where you could get episodes about big ideas (O’Brien being put in a simulator and serving decades in prison mentally within a few days, or the Colonial Fleet essentially devolving in to a caste system) for an episode and the idea simply exists to give the episode some drama, but not existing outside of that episode. That B5 episode had some nice moments of soft continuity such as the choice of the jumpgate to destroy, and it showing Franklin’s intensity (that leads to his own downfall), and the show overall had concepts that gave it a sense of continuity. The slow sleepwalk in to fascism has aged far too well…
I named the family dog after Delenn when I was a kid. We also had a cat named Picard.
Meow it so. Get it
Nice. He earned his name because he boldly went where no kitty had gone before (under the seats in our Volvo when we were bringing him home for the first time).
This one really hit me. I loved her. Her story’s pretty fascinating too. When the Soviet empire collapsed and the civil war started, she joined a theatrical troupe that performed on both sides of the now-divided Yugoslavia in a gesture of peace. This got her death threats and harassment of all kind which is why she had to leave.Always wanted to meet her. Damn. Sounds like she had been sick for a while and just wasn’t recovering.
That’s an amazing detail, thank you for it.
Just last night I watched a Netflix doc about the (Irish) Miami Show Band who played shows in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland during the Troubles. One night in 1975, while near the border traveling back from a gig, they were victims of a horrific terrorist attack that killed three of their members. The juxtaposition of the joy of live music (bands and fans) with that kind of horrific political reality is sobering.
As JMS mentions in his post, he brought this up when he met her:“During our first meeting, we spoke about her work and her life, and I learned that she had been part of a touring theater group that continued to cross borders of the disintegrating country despite receiving death threats from both sides in the civil war.I expressed my admiration for her courage, but she shrugged and waved it off. “What’s the worst that could have happened? Yes, they could have killed me. So what? Art should have no borders.””
I’m seriously starting to think Bruce Boxleitner may be the last actor standing from this show, despite Sheridan spending the last two seasons technically dead and on borrowed time that everyone’s very aware of. To put this in full perspective, 84 year old Walter Koenig has now outlived eight of them.
I saw a tweet earlier that of the main cast members of The Gathering (the B5 pilot), only three are alive: Tamlyn Tomita, Peter Jurasik, and Patricia Tallman.
More time has passed between the airing of the B5 finale and the amount of time Sheridan had left when he was returned by Lorien.
Mind. Blown.
Oh damn. I had such a crush on her in B5
Oh damn. I had such a crush on her in B5
That’s too many for a show that was on less than 30 years ago. O’Hare, Katsulas, Furlan, Biggs, Doyle, Conaway, Furst…
They should be here doing a movie. Or cameos in a reboot.
Tim Choate (Zathras) is another one who has gone – a minor character, but one everyone remembers fondly.
The memorial by JMS for Mira is a great tribute, but you really feel it when he writes that saying goodbye to friends only gets harder
Part of it is that it was an older cast; it was not a bunch of kids. I think that helped its world feel more lived-in, like the crew of the Nostromo.
Yes, it was a somewhat older cast at the time. Not like a family comedy with a bunch of kids and teens. But I think that they were all pretty much in their mid-60s when they died. Which is not old.
Yes, it was a somewhat older cast at the time. Not like a family comedy with a bunch of kids and teens. But I think that they were all pretty much in their mid-60s when they died. Which is not old.
Agreed, too young. At least Bruce Boxleitner is still with us. Tron!
The cast was adult but not any older than say the Star Trek shows at the time. Like, the whole core cast of TNG is still alive and well and quite a few of them are cashing in on the current Star Trek revival. The tragedy of the B5 cast is that so many died so young – even 65 is not particularly old in today’s world.
They were not appreciably older than the TNG cast, which is currently sitting at a 0% fatality rate and still making Star Trek. LeVar Burton is the youngest (non-Wil Wheaton category) at 63. IIRC, the only major Trek cast members (from the 90s) to have passed are Rene Auberjonois, who was already in his 60s by the end of DS9, and Aron Eisenberg who had health issues his entire life. Maybe it’s something to do with space stations, though…
It feels like time took a greater toll on the cast of Babylon 5 than the original series of Star Trek.
I’m really starting to think that Straczynski’s plan to save money on B5’s production costs by filming in an abandoned nuclear reactor that had been built on top of a Native American burial mound was penny wise but pound foolish.Can someone please drive by Claudia Christian’s house and do a wellness check?(Seriously, RIP to Ms. Furlan, but what the hell? Was the show literally cursed?)
Actually, the show was filmed in an old hot tub factory so who knows what the cast and crew could have been exposed to. There definitely seems to be a bit of “The Conqueror Curse” hanging over the show..https://www.wideopencountry.com/how-did-john-wayne-die/
They eventually had a radiation test on the place, and the inspector said there was no amount of money that could convince him to spend an hour in JMS’ office. He’d been working in there for three years at the time.
Wait seriously? Is there a link to that?
The statistical impact on people working on the movie is controversial (and, especially for the smoke ‘em if you got ‘em generation, has some large confounding and perhaps potentiating factors). But a lot of experts believe that “downwinders” in southwestern Utah and nearby areas got the short end of the stick — a cohort of Cold War casualties whose surviving members got some recognition and compensation only after long struggle. A series of tests called Upshot-Knothole loomed especially large in the area where The Conqueror was filmed, and one in particular, code named Harry, had a much larger than expected yield and threw up a lot of dirt into winds that had unexpectedly changed direction. Atmospheric testing, though, would continue for another nine years, totaling 100 shots (another 921 were underground beginning with a 1962 treaty). But I digress. RIP, Mira Furlan, who exemplified the combination of mind and heart that made B5 one of my favorite shows.
A friend of mine had this theory that the crew and cast from The Conqueror brought back as memorabilia samples of vitrified sand generated by the nuclear blasts, which would turn to generate radiations even in their homes.
Did these people learn nothing from the Stalker shoot(s)?
I’ll go check on her. She once said a really nice thing to me after nearly tripping over me. I was nearly crying sitting on a curb outside the Milwaukee convention center during Gencon in like 1998. Its a long story. Needless to say I think maybe we are friends now
Maybe she should have just boffed you.
So sad. I have a card from the Babylon 5 trading card game that is signed by her. It belonged to my college room-mate, he left it in our place after he moved out. I always intended to give it back to him, but he passed last year.
Such a shame. Delenn was a great character and it’s really too bad she didn’t get many other high profile roles. I wonder if our old gimmick commenter of yore will chime in here.
The Delenn scene I’ve thought about frequently for the last couple of decades — and to be fair, also misremembered for a lot of that time — was this one:I keep waiting for us to wake up together, before it’s too late, but I wonder if we have anyone who can wake us up.
“She is survived by her husband, Gajić, and their son, Marko Lav Gajić”Not sure why it’s so difficult to include the husband’s first name-Goran Gajić
.
Rest in peace.
This absolutely crushed me today. To damn young.
Another Babylon 5 alum gone to the place where no shadows fall. I saw that someone posted the scene from Babylon 5, but she was also just as great in the quiet moments. The conversation between her and G’kar when she has to tell him they have known about the Shadows all along was heart wrenching. Then there was the story line about the Minbari civil war which Furlan, by all accounts, saw as an analog to her own experiences in Yugoslavia. My heart goes out to Goran and her son. She was a great actress.
My favorite scene of the whole series, as long as we are getting nostalgic. Delenn is in it, but it is not centered on her:
Babylon 5: Minbari gets a laugh – YouTube
I loved her as Rousseau on Lost. Kind of shipped her and Sayid. She was way cooler than Shannon
This one cut a bit. I really loved her in B5. She brought a wisdom and grace to Delenn that I think few others could have achieved.
Oh, damn. I saw some of B5 and her character was definitely one of the most interesting ones to me. In the years after that show ended I would also occasionally see her in random small roles all over the place. She’s one of those actors that’s fun to see pop up in unexpected places, like “oh, her! Yeah she’s cool, I didn’t know she’d be in this.” Melanie Lynskey and Kristin Chenoweth also have that affect for me. I had no idea she was in “Lost,” but I also never watched that show. 65 is young though. That’s really sad.
Such a bummer. I met Ms. Furlan at an SF con, and yes, her voice was just like what you heard on Babylon 5—the timbre was pure music. I never met anyone in my entire life who could use their larnyx to produce such pleasingly pronounced words.
She died from the West Nile virus. It doesn’t normally exist in the Balkans, but there was one brief period where it was a concern, and I guess this was the time it hit her.
She was a Croatian actress who married a Serbian director. As a consequence, both had to flee for their lives from Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, in 1991 when the Yugoslav wars were starting.