Danilo Stojković (; 11 August 1934 – 16 March 2002), commonly nicknamed Bata (Бата), was a Yugoslav and Serbian theatre, television and film actor.
Stojković's numerous comedic portrayals of state officials and working-class characters made him popular with Serbian and ex-Yugoslav audiences. Most of his roles came in collaborations with either director Slobodan Šijan or scriptwriter Dušan Kovačević, or both.
Career
Early career
Stojković was born in Belgrade in 1934. By the mid-1960s, he became a well-known theatre actor. He started his film career with the 1964 feature Izdajnik (lit. "The Traitor").
He also fulfilled the fatherly role in an immensely popular TV show Grlom u jagode. The show originally aired in 1975 and kept finding its audience through numerous reruns in the 1980s and the 1990s. He also played the minor antagonist in Goran Marković's urban classic Nacionalna klasa do 750 cm<sup>3</sup> (National Class Category Up to 750 ccm), 1979.
Breakthrough
Stojković worked with the director Slobodan Šijan, who was in turn most successful when working with Dušan Kovačević scripts. Kovačević, a talented playwright with a special gift for biting satire, had a knack for writing characters which Stojković could perfectly translate to screen. The combination of those three creative talents yielded some of Yugoslavia's most memorable cinematic efforts to date.
Šijan, who previously worked with Stojković on several TV productions, made his big screen debut with Ko to tamo peva (Who's Singing Over There?, 1980), a farcical comedy set at the beginning of World War II in then Yugoslavia. In a strong cast ensemble, Stojković distinguished himself with role of a Germanophile bus passenger on the way to Beograd in the eve of 5 April 1941 – the day Belgrade was bombed by the Axis powers marking Yugoslavia's entry into the war.
Ko to tamo peva was released to great critical and commercial success, earning the special jury award at the Montreal World Film Festival in Canada.
He reunited with Šijan for another high-water mark of Serbian film, the black comedy Maratonci trče počasni krug (Marathon Family). The film, a humorous piece about a family whose undertaking business is being threatened by the local mobster was another smash success for Šijan and Stojković, and achieved cult status. He also voiced Stromboli in the Serbian-language version of Pinocchio.
Marxists, spies and revolutionaries
After a couple minor roles, from which his turn as the school principal in comedy Idemo dalje (lit. Moving On, 1982) deserved some mention, Stojković delivered a trio of performances which would ultimately cement his place in the Yugoslavian acting hall of fame. Oddly enough, all three of those roles would involve him portraying a character closely related to the communist ideals – or better said, satirizing a stereotype of "party men" or "marxist revolutionaries".
First was his portrait of a homeless wannabe revolutionary Babi Pupuška, in Šijan's Kako sam sistematski uništen od idiota (How I Got Systematically Destroyed by an Idiot, (1983), a story about a man who embarks on a soul-searching journey after hearing the, for him at least, shattering news of Che Guevara's demise. Stojković portrayed another dysfunctional Marxist father figure in Goran Paskaljević's elegiac Varljivo leto '68 (The Elusive Summer of '68, 1984).
Again uniting his talents with those of Dušan Kovačević, Stojković delivered his ultimate film performance – that of the staunch Stalinist and a full-time paranoid in Balkanski špijun (Balkan Spy, 1984), which was jointly directed by Božidar Nikolić and Kovačević himself. With Kovačević at his sharpest, Stojković made the role of ex-political prisoner Ilija Čvorović completely his own. Critics often single out this role as Stojković's most notable.
Awards and legacy
Throughout his lifetime, Stojković was the recipient of the Serbian Lifetime Achievement Award for both theatrical (Dobričin prsten, 1990) and cinematic (Pavle Vujisić, 1998) efforts. He remains as popular in death as he was in life, as his characters have entertained numerous generations of Serbo-Croatian speakers. His numerous comedic portrayals of state officials and working-class characters made him popular with Yugoslav audiences.