Miki Manojlović

One of the most prominent Serbian actors on the international scene, Miki Manojlovic hailed from an acting family. He started appearing in movies at the age of 20, while the Iron Curtain was still draped over his country. Much of his early output was on television, with stints on shows like "Otpisani" and "Grlom u jagode," but Emir Kusturica's Golden Palm-winning drama, "When Father Was Away on Business," put Manojlovic on the map.

He played the eponymous father, a political prisoner who was spirited away by the repressive communist regime during the postwar era; the title comes from the euphemistic rendering of the situation that's handed down to his son. Manojlovic revisited that period of his nation's past again in "Tito and Me," which concerned a schoolboy's adulation of the Yugoslavian dictator Marshal Tito.

By this point, however, the actor was also getting offers from abroad; his résumé is replete with credits from France, Italy, and Germany and he played the controversial nuclear physicist Edward Teller in the multinational TV miniseries "Race for the Bomb." In the English-language "Irina Palm," he worked with the British musician Marianne Faithfull.

Yugoslavia always remained close to his heart, however, and he has continued to work with Kusturica (in the sprawling "Underground," which traced Yugoslav history from World War II up through the 1990s) and the director Goran Paskaljevic (in "Someone Else's America," in which Manojlovic's mother was played by his real mom).