Oja Kodar is a Croatian actress, screenwriter and director known as Orson Welles's romantic partner and mistress during the later years of his life.
16 Facts About Oja Kodar
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Oja Kodar met Welles in 1961 in Zagreb, Croatia, Yugoslavia, when Welles was on location shooting The Trial, released the following year.
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In 1966, five years after they met, the couple returned to the Yugoslav coast, where Welles began shooting The Deep based on Charles Williams's 1963 novel Dead Calm with Oja Kodar playing one of the main roles.
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Decades later, Oja Kodar blamed it on an unwillingness by jealous co-star Jeanne Moreau to dub her lines, while editor Mauro Bonanni claimed Welles abandoned The Deep when he realized the novice Oja Kodar was ill-suited for the lead role.
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Oja Kodar says she co-wrote the screenplay with Welles, though it dates back to the early 1960s as a project Welles first conceived with Keith Baxter and Anthony Perkins in key roles.
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Oja Kodar co-wrote and appeared as herself in Welles's free-form documentary F for Fake, which initially received mixed reviews but grew in stature in the years since, owing to its groundbreaking editing techniques.
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In 1980, Oja Kodar collaborated on a script for Welles's film The Dreamers based on Karen Blixen's stories.
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Three months after Welles died in October 1985, Oja Kodar sold her book rights to Dead Calm for $180,000 to Australian producer George Miller for a 1989 film of the same name; however, the deal nearly went sour until producers informed Oja Kodar they would hold her liable for damages.
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Oja Kodar made her debut as a feature film director with the release of Jaded.
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Oja Kodar supervised Jess Franco's assemblage of unedited footage of Welles's Don Quixote, which was released in 1992 to generally poor reviews.
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Oja Kodar later co-directed and co-wrote the German-French documentary Orson Welles: The One-Man Band.
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Oja Kodar is interviewed in Los Angeles and in Orvilliers, France, where they shared a house.
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Oja Kodar finally signed an agreement with Rymsza, Marshall and Netflix to complete the movie in February 2017.
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Oja Kodar viewed a rough cut of the film in early 2018 and suggested changes, particularly to the film-within-a-film sequences, according to editor Bob Murawski.
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Oja Kodar expressed some ambivalence about the completion in a July 2018 interview.
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Oja Kodar was unable to attend the Venice Film Festival premiere owing to health issues and family matters.