Slavonic blood

Fabijan was born in the village of Ladimirevci near Valpovo. In the place that, some fifty years later, would become the stage for his own literary work, drama and film "Sokol didn't love him".

- My father and mother had four of us. Two brothers and two sisters. My uncle had a daughter and a son. We all lived in one house. We had a big room made of alleys where there was a stove and where we - all the children - slept. Grandma had her own little room near the kitchen. There were two bedrooms where our parents and uncle's married couple, aunt and uncle slept. - said Fabijan in his "Acting Records".

When Fabijan was only seven years old, he lost his father. Three years later, his mother also died. She wanted to give him "to pops" because he was the youngest, but also intelligent. After the death of their mother, the uncle took his brother's children "under his wing", for which Fabijan was forever grateful. He also sent him to school.

- In addition to all the poverty during the war, he fulfilled my mother's and father's wish to send me to school, and there is also the logic that as the youngest, I was weak for the field, because there were older people who were a little stronger for agricultural work, both during the war and after the war. Even then, my uncle's son could lift a sack of fifty kilograms of grain on his back, but where would I do that? - wrote Fabijan.

Fabijan soon enrolled in the Faculty of Civil Engineering in Osijek, but he did not do well there. Since he was a child, he was troubled by mathematics, so he had a -2 in statics! Instead of computer operations, Fabijan was interested in acting.

– I read the magazine "Film" for mathematics, a broad magazine, so they moved me to the first desk from the last. By punishment, which I passed on to a kind of youthful love. I already read a lot about my current profession, so later I just expanded that knowledge. Construction is my hobby today, just as theater and film were my hobbies in the past. –

Namely, Fabijan acted as an amateur in his native Ladimirevci, and while studying in Osijek, he continued with his hobby. Then, in 1953, he ambitiously enrolled in acting studies at the Academy of Theater Arts in Zagreb.

- The funeral of Dujšin and Nazor, I read at the time, stretched from the theater to Mirogoj. Osijek had its triumphal arches, flags in the dust of which I slept on the floor, in the Youth Committee, watched, looked better at the plays, was late for the unheated winter steam trains, which always left earlier than the plays ended. Reprimands at school, awards in amateur acting, the decision to move to the big city, where poets are buried with dignity. –

And that's how it all started. Over the years, Fabijan was a member of the theater "Gavella", the national theater in Zagreb, he participated in the work of "Guest Theater", and he also worked as a freelance artist and performed at all our biggest festivals. –

Fabijan most often played psychologically complex characters. He was equally good in the roles of dark peasants and cynical intellectuals. He believed that the source of his acting personality was his father, who died prematurely.

– I once said that my father left his hands to me and it all started from there. He also left some dirt under the nails of that hand, some of his primitivism and rawness, which I don't want to erase. –