Oja Kodar

Oja Kodar (OY-ah ko-DAHR; born 1941) is a Croatian actress, screenwriter and director, best known as Orson Welles' partner during the last years of his life.

Born Olga Palinkaš in Zagreb to a Hungarian father and a Croatian mother, Kodar was the partner and lover of Orson Welles during the final years of his life. They met in Zagreb in 1961, when Welles was in town filming The Trial. Forty-six-year-old Welles, at the time married to his third wife Paola Mori, took a liking to the twenty-year-old "dark, beautiful and exotic-looking" Palinkaš. Soon after they began their relationship, Welles gave her a stage name Oja Kodar, which is a mixture of the name 'Oja' given by her sister Nina and the Croatian expression 'ko-dar' (as a present).

The Italian press broke news of Welles's affair with Kodar in March 1970, though Mori was apparently unaware of it until 1984.

In his final years, Welles divided his time between a Las Vegas home he shared with Mori and a Hollywood house with Kodar. Mori died 10 months after her husband and the estate was settled by Kodar and Beatrice Welles, Mori and Welles's daughter, on November 7, 1986.

Most of Kodar's cinematic career revolved around Welles's projects, many of which were never completed.

In 1966, five years after they met, the couple went back to the Yugoslav coast where Welles began shooting The Deep based on Charles Williams' novel Dead Calm with Kodar playing one of the main roles. Welles envisioned the film as a commercial project, designed to do well at the box-office; however, the production ran into financial and technical difficulties and was not completed. Decades later, 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 Kodar was ill-suited for the lead role.

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