Radmila Karaklajić

Radmila Karaklajić is a Serbian pop and pop rock singer and actress, born on 8 October 1939 in Belgrade, whose career spans more than six decades. A top pupil at her gymnasium, she graduated in English at the Faculty of Philology in Belgrade, and in her student years she sang jazz with a student orchestra.

Her first triumph, as she told Ilustrovana Politika in 2006, came at a festival in Pesaro, Italy, in 1964, where she won first prize with Dragomir Ristić's "Proslaviću taj dan", accompanied by the RTV Belgrade orchestra under Bubiša Simić. The same year brought "Anđelina zumba zumba", her version of Louis Prima's "Angelina / Zooma Zooma", which made her famous in Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Serbian Wikipedia puts its sales at close to 1.5 million copies; in the interview she spoke of more than 200,000 in Yugoslavia and 1.2 million in the USSR. Three more EPs followed in 1964, among them Crne oči and Nada.

In 1965 she went on a six-month tour of the Soviet Union, and she later went back for solo concerts; in Georgia in 1967 she was met at the station by a town orchestra and a folk dance ensemble. She became so popular in the Soviet Union that girls there were named after her.

At home she was a festival regular. At Beogradsko proleće she sang "Naš roman" (1963) and "Još samo noćas" (1972), and at Opatija in 1963 "Lepa Kosovka" and the duet "Nemoj sada da me ostavljaš" with Đorđe Marjanović. At the Split festival she won with "Bokeljska noć", which also took the arrangement award, and "Turist" won the lyrics prize in 1967. She sang "Što je bilo, prošlo je" at Pesma leta in 1969 and "Zovem te, draga" at Vaš šlager sezone in 1971, and won both the audience and jury prizes at Akordi Kosova in 1973 with "Arabela".

She appeared in the film Dobar vetar 'Plava ptico' (1967) and the TV series Obraz uz obraz (1972). Her albums include Radmila Karaklajić (1978), Ciganske pesme (1981) and an album with a Russian title from 1983, and she lived on Cyprus for several years. In 2026 Radmila Karaklajić received a lifetime achievement award at Beogradsko proleće, at the evening marking the festival's 65th anniversary.