Olivera Vučo, née Vukotić, (Serbian Cyrillic: Оливера Вучо, née Вукотић), also known as Olivera Katarina and Olivera Petrović (born March 5, 1940 Belgrade

Belgrade

Belgrade is the capital and largest city of Serbia. It is located at the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers, where the Pannonian Plain meets the Balkans. According to official results of Census 2011, the city has a population of 1,639,121. It is one of the 15 largest cities in Europe...

, Kingdom of Yugoslavia

Kingdom of Yugoslavia

The Kingdom of Yugoslavia was a state stretching from the Western Balkans to Central Europe which existed during the often-tumultuous interwar era of 1918–1941...

, now Serbia

Serbia

Serbia , officially the Republic of Serbia , is a landlocked country located at the crossroads of Central and Southeast Europe, covering the southern part of the Carpathian basin and the central part of the Balkans...

) is a Serbian

Serbs

The Serbs are a South Slavic ethnic group of the Balkans and southern Central Europe. Serbs are located mainly in Serbia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina, and form a sizable minority in Croatia, the Republic of Macedonia and Slovenia. Likewise, Serbs are an officially recognized minority in...

 actress and singer. She reached the peak of her popularity in the 1960s and 1970s.

She studied at the academy for theatre

Theatre

Theatre is a collaborative form of fine art that uses live performers to present the experience of a real or imagined event before a live audience in a specific place. The performers may communicate this experience to the audience through combinations of gesture, speech, song, music or dance...

, film

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

, radio

Radio

Radio is the transmission of signals through free space by modulation of electromagnetic waves with frequencies below those of visible light. Electromagnetic radiation travels by means of oscillating electromagnetic fields that pass through the air and the vacuum of space...

 and television

Television

Television is a telecommunication medium for transmitting and receiving moving images that can be monochrome or colored, with accompanying sound...

 in Belgrade. Started her career as a student with a major role as Koštana

Koštana

Koštana is a popular play, written by Borisav Stanković. It is set in Stanković's native Vranje, a town in southern Serbia. It features a many themes of Serbian folklore and patriarchal customs which were still present in the late nineteenth century...

 in a same name play in a National Theatre in Belgrade

National Theatre in Belgrade

The National Theatre was founded in the latter half of the 19th century. It is located on Republic Square, in Belgrade, Serbia.The National Theatre was declared a Monument of Culture of Great Importance in 1983, and it is protected by the Republic of Serbia....

. There she met Vuk Vučo, a theatre critic whom she later married.

For a role in Goya - oder Der arge Weg der Erkenntnis in 1971 (as Olivera Katarina), she was awarded at festivals in Moscow

Moscow International Film Festival

Moscow International Film Festival , is the film festival first held in Moscow in 1959. From its inception to 1995 it was held every second year in July, alternating with the Karlovy Vary festival. The festival has been held annually since 1995....

 and Venice

Venice Film Festival

The Venice International Film Festival is the oldest international film festival in the world. Founded by Count Giuseppe Volpi in 1932 as the "Esposizione Internazionale d'Arte Cinematografica", the festival has since taken place every year in late August or early September on the island of the...

. Her major success was in Aleksandar Petrović's I Even Met Happy Gypsies

I Even Met Happy Gypsies

I Even Met Happy Gypsies is a 1967 Yugoslav film by Serbian director Aleksandar Petrović. Its original Serbian title is Skupljači perja, which means The Feather Gatherers. The film is centered around Roma people's life in a village in northern Vojvodina, but it also deals with subtler themes such...

, where she played a gipsy singer named Lenče. Film was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 40th Academy Awards

40th Academy Awards

The 40th Academy Awards honored film achievements of 1967. Originally scheduled for 8 April 1968, the awards were postponed to two days later, 10 April 1968, because of the assassination of Dr...

, for a Palme d'Or

Palme d'Or

The Palme d'Or is the highest prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival and is presented to the director of the best feature film of the official competition. It was introduced in 1955 by the organising committee. From 1939 to 1954, the highest prize was the Grand Prix du Festival International du...

 at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival

1967 Cannes Film Festival

-Jury:*Alessandro Blasetti *Georges Lourau *Sergei Bondarchuk *René Bonnell *Jean-Louis Bory *Miklós Jancsó *Claude Lelouch *Shirley MacLaine...

, and for Best Foreign-Language film at the 26th Golden Globe Awards

26th Golden Globe Awards

The 26th Golden Globe Awards, honoring the best in film and television for 1968 films, were held on February 24, 1969.-Best Actor - Drama: Peter O'Toole - The Lion in Winter*Alan Arkin - The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter*Alan Bates - The Fixer...

. It won the FIPRESCI

FIPRESCI

The International Federation of Film Critics is an association of national organizations of professional film critics and film journalists from around the world for "the promotion and development of film culture and for the safeguarding of professional interests." It was founded in June 1930 in...

 Grand Prize of the Jury

Grand Prix (Cannes Film Festival)

The Grand Prix is an award of the Cannes Film Festival bestowed by the jury of the festival on one of the competing feature films. It is the second-most prestigious prize of the festival after the Palme d'Or...

 at the 1967 Cannes Film Festival. Olivera closed this festival with a concert together with Nana Mouskouri

Nana Mouskouri

Nana Mouskouri , born Ioánna Moúschouri on October 13, 1934, in Chania, Crete, Greece, is a Greek singer who has sold about 300 million records worldwide in a career spanning over five decades, making her one of the best-selling music artists of all time. She was known as Nána to her friends and...

 and Dionne Warwick

Dionne Warwick

Dionne Warwick is an American singer, actress and TV show host, who became a United Nations Global Ambassador for the Food and Agriculture Organization, and a United States Ambassador of Health....

.

She also had a very prominent singing career. She recorded in Serbian language

Serbian language

Serbian is a form of Serbo-Croatian, a South Slavic language, spoken by Serbs in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia and neighbouring countries....

, as well as in Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

, Japanese

Japanese language

is a language spoken by over 130 million people in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities. It is a member of the Japonic language family, which has a number of proposed relationships with other languages, none of which has gained wide acceptance among historical linguists .Japanese is an...

, Romanian

Romanian language

Romanian Romanian Romanian (or Daco-Romanian; obsolete spellings Rumanian, Roumanian; self-designation: română, limba română ("the Romanian language") or românește (lit. "in Romanian") is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova...

, Greek

Greek language

Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...

, Romani

Romani language

Romani or Romany, Gypsy or Gipsy is any of several languages of the Romani people. They are Indic, sometimes classified in the "Central" or "Northwestern" zone, and sometimes treated as a branch of their own....

, Macedonian

Macedonian language

Macedonian is a South Slavic language spoken as a first language by approximately 2–3 million people principally in the region of Macedonia but also in the Macedonian diaspora...

  and Indonesian

Indonesian language

Indonesian is the official language of Indonesia. Indonesian is a normative form of the Riau Islands dialect of Malay, an Austronesian language which has been used as a lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries....

. She sang traditional Serbian folk

Folk music

Folk music is an English term encompassing both traditional folk music and contemporary folk music. The term originated in the 19th century. Traditional folk music has been defined in several ways: as music transmitted by mouth, as music of the lower classes, and as music with unknown composers....

 songs and Gypsy/Romani songs. In famous Paris Olympia

Paris Olympia

The Olympia is a music hall in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. Located at No. 28, Boulevard des Capucines, its closest métro/RER stations are Madeleine, Opéra, Havre – Caumartin and Auber....

 she held 72 consecutive concerts.

Olivera Katarina is also known as "the only woman Salvador Dali

Salvador Dalí

Salvador Domènec Felip Jacint Dalí i Domènech, Marquis de Púbol , commonly known as Salvador Dalí , was a prominent Spanish Catalan surrealist painter born in Figueres,Spain....

 knelt in front of", being amazed by her beauty and voice, after her concert in Paris.

In 2007, Katarina contributed songs for Marina Abramović

Marina Abramovic

Marina Abramović is a Belgrade-born New York-based Serbian performance artist who began her career in the early 1970s. Active for over three decades, she has recently begun to describe herself as the “grandmother of performance art.” Abramović's work explores the relationship between performer and...

's Balkan Erotic Epic

Destricted

Destricted is an ongoing project of films that explore the line where art and pornography intersect. The UK and US film releases had overlapping but different film lineups...

, and portrays a goddess in Uroš Stojanović's film Čarlston za Ognjenku.

She has one son, Mane, with late husband Miladin Šakić. Mane is a painter and lives in Madrid

Madrid

Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...

.

External links