Irfan Mensur

Born to father Mensur Kurić from Niš whose family traces its origins to Donji Vakuf in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sarajevo-born mother Nada Wasche of Czech and Hungarian descent,^[1] Irfan grew up in Sarajevo's Dolac Malta neighbourhood.^[2][3] His childhood pursuits in Sarajevo generally revolved around sports.^[1] At the age of 15, as a result of his parents divorcing, young Irfan moved with his father to Niš.

In Niš, Irfan's father married the actress Miroslava "Mima" Vuković [sr], so adolescent Irfan spent part of his teenage years living with a stepmother.^[2]

Encouraged by his stage actress stepmother, young Irfan began pursuing performing arts after, by own admission, setting foot inside a theater for the first time at age 16.^[1] Within a few years, he successfully passed the audition to enrol at the Academy of Theatre, Film, Radio and Television in Belgrade where he began studying under the tutelage of professor Minja Dedić [sr].^[2][1] Soon after moving to Belgrade, he legally changed his last name to Mensur in honour of his father.^[2]

After appearing in several supporting roles in different Yugoslav TV movies and series, in 1975, twenty-two-year-old Mensur landed the role of Gavrilo Princip in a high-budget Yugoslav-Czechoslovak-West German co-production, The Day That Shook the World. Directed by Veljko Bulajić and featuring a cast headed by prominent, globally-known actors Christopher Plummer, Florinda Bolkan, and Maximilian Schell, the film about the 1914 assassination of the Austro-Hungarian archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo was an ambitious and generously funded project that ended up securing a theatrical release in a number of countries. However, it was met with lukewarm reviews and limited box office success. For his part, in later interviews, Mensur talked about being extremely dissatisfied with his own performance in the high-profile movie that "marked me in the Yugoslav public consciousness to the point of forcing me to have to go around convincing different film and TV people [in Yugoslavia] that I'm actually not a bad actor".^[4]