Croatia

Famous Croatian People: Croatian Artists, Scientists, Leaders, Musicians, Politicians and Athletes

Croatia is a melting pot of cultures and ethnicities with outstanding individuals who made a difference with their remarkable achievements.The following people made their mark on both the local and international scenes. They are just some of many famous Croatians who have lifted Croatia’s name worldwide and made a difference in our world. Their purpose and stories inspired awe if not greatness.

:: List of Famous People from Croatia ::

Savka Dabcevic-Kucar
Croatian socialist politician Savka Dabcevic-Kucar became Europe’s first female Prime Minister. She was one of the most influential Croatian female politicians during the communist period, especially during the Croatian Spring when she was deposed. She returned to politics during the early days of Croatian independence as the leader of the Coalition of People’s Accord and the Croatian People’s Party.

Rudolph Steiner
Philospher and social thinker Rudolf Joseph Lorenz Steiner was born in Donji Kraljevec, Croatia, then Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire. He gained initial recognition as a literary critic and cultural philosopher. At the beginning of the 20th century, he founded a spiritual movement, Anthroposophy, as an esoteric philosophy growing out of European transcendentalism and with links to Theosophy. Steiner advocated a form of ethical individualism, to which he later brought a more explicitly spiritual component. He based his epistemology on Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s world view, in which “Thinking … is no more and no less an organ of perception than the eye or ear. Just as the eye perceives colors and the ear sounds, so thinking perceives ideas.” A consistent thread that runs from his earliest philosophical phase through his later spiritual orientation is the goal of demonstrating that there are no essential limits to human knowledge.

Bela Cikoš Sesija
Bela Cikoš Sesija was a Croatian painter of historical and allegorical scenes at the turn of the 20th century. He was one of the founders of the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb, as well as one of the first representatives of symbolism (Secession/Art Nouveau) in Croatia.

Mia Corak Slavenska
Mia Corak Slavenska was a Croatian-born American prima ballerina. She formed the Slavenska Ballette Variante and, later, the Theatre Ballette. In 1954, she became the prima ballerina of the Metropolitan Opera Ballet.

Mira Furlan
Mira Furlan is a Croatian actress and singer currently residing in the United States. She is well known for her roles as the Minbari Ambassador Delenn on all five seasons of the science fiction television series Babylon 5 (aired 1993 – 1998), and Danielle Rousseau on Lost.

Krsto Papic
Krsto Papic is a Croatian screenwriter and film director whose career spans several decades. Papic’s early feature films and documentaries were part of Croatian and Yugoslav New Cinema, and often regarded as Croatian echo of the Serbian Black Wave, while Papic himself was connected to the Croatian Spring. Papic’s subsequent feature films were more classical in its narration, but again politically controversial in the last decade of Yugoslavia. Particularly My Uncle’s Legacy, critical picture of Yugoslavia’s political situation under Titoism during Informbiro period, which won nomination for Golden Globe in 1989, has been surrounded by controversy and political attacks from traditional Party circles and especially Partisan Veterans’ organizations. Papic was awarded with Croatia’s highest Vladimir Nazor Award for live achievement in cinema in 2006, and with Grand Prix Special des Amériques at the Montreal Film Festival in 2004.

Zvonimir Rogoz
A native of Zagreb, Croatian actor Zvonimir Rogoz became famous in Czechoslovakia between the two world wars. He appeared in many Czechoslovakian films of the 1930s, but the best known of them all was the 1933 erotic drama Ecstasy, featuring Hedy Lamarr, who shocked the public by appearing nude. From 1950s onwards, Rogoz appeared in Croatian films, but the younger generations of Croatia remember him best for his private life: he fathered a child at the age of 96. This and other events became the subject of his autobiographical book Mojih prvih 100 godina (My First 100 Years).
He died in Zagreb a few months after his 100th birthday.

Branko Lustig
Branko Lustig is a prominent Croatian film producer. He is the only Croatian person to have won two Academy Awards. Lustig received his first Oscar in 1993 for the production of Schindler’s List, a film based on the novel of Thomas Keneally (which is, in turn, based on the true-life story of a German manufacturer who saved hundreds of Jews during World War II). He received his second Oscar for the epic movie Gladiator about a struggle for power in Imperial Rome, in 2001. Other major Hollywood films that Lustig has worked on as a producer or executive producer include The Peacemaker (1997), Hannibal (2001), and Black Hawk Down (2001).

Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla was an inventor, mechanical engineer, and electrical engineer. He was an important contributor to the birth of commercial electricity, and is best known for his many revolutionary developments in the field of electromagnetism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Tesla’s patents and theoretical work formed the basis of modern alternating current (AC) electric power systems, including the polyphase system of electrical distribution and the AC motor. This work helped usher in the Second Industrial Revolution.

Juan Vucetich
Juan Vucetich was a Croatian-born Argentine anthropologist and police official who pioneered the use of fingerprinting. Vucetich was born as Ivan Vucetic at Hvar in Dalmatia – then Habsburg Monarchy, now Croatia – and immigrated to Argentina in 1882. In 1891 Vucetich began the first filing of fingerprints based on ideas of Francis Galton which he expanded significantly. He became the director of the Center for Dactyloscopy in Buenos Aires. At the time, he included the Bertillon system alongside the fingerprint files. In 1892 Vucetich made the first positive identification of a criminal in a case where Francisca Rojas had killed her two sons and then cut her throat, trying to put the blame on the outside attacker. A bloody print identified her as the killer. Argentine police adopted Vucetich’s method of fingerprinting classification and it spread to police forces all over the world. Vucetich improved his method with new material and in 1904 published Dactiloscopía Comparada (“Comparative Dactyloscopy”)