MOVIES : From the Ashes of a Ravaged Land : Actor Rade Serbedzija left his native Yugoslavia to continue his career in the acclaimed ‘Before the Rain.’ It’s a story that mirrors his life.

If Milcho Manchevski’s critically acclaimed debut film, “Before the Rain,” sheds light on the tragedy of ethnic cleansing currently ravaging the region once known as Yugoslavia, the story of the film’s star, Rade Serbedzija, illuminates the situation even further.

A poet, singer and actor who had been one of Yugoslavia’s best-loved stars for two decades, Serbedzija refused to take sides in the bloody war destroying his homeland and, hence, was branded a traitor in every quarter.

Forced to flee his home in Belgrade in 1992 with his wife of two years and their infant daughter, he is now a man without a country, albeit one with the prospect of a new career as a film star in the West.

The chance of Serbedzija’s making a new life is better than good if the reviews he’s receiving for his work in “Before the Rain” (which also stars Katrin Cartlidge and Gregoire Colin) are any indication. A story told in three sections that alternate between London and the Macedonian countryside, the film, which opened Friday, presents Serbedzija as a war photographer who abandons his career to return to his home in rural Macedonia. He discovers that his home, however, and the familial bonds that once held it together, have been obliterated by civil war. The story bears marked similarities to Serbedzija’s own life.

“I’m a Serb born in Croatia, and my language, mentality and culture are Serbo-Croatian,” says the 48-year-old actor during an interview in a Hollywood hotel room littered with books, scripts and cassettes.

“As an actor, I worked all over Yugoslavia for audiences of all backgrounds--I was a well-known performer there and, as such, I did what I could to stop the war. I attended meetings, spoke on television and wrote poems and songs protesting nationalism. Because of those activities and because I refused to take sides, both the Serbs and the Croats hate me now and that’s why I had to leave.”

Serbedzija lost a lot when he was forced to flee his homeland.

“Rade was the film star of Yugoslavia before the country fell apart, and I saw him in dozens of films and plays when I was growing up,” says director Manchevski, who completed his ambitious first film for the modest sum of $2.5 million.

“Oddly enough, my familiarity with him made me reluctant to cast him--I didn’t want to be sentimental and I was afraid I’d be intimidated by him,” Manchevski adds.

“That didn’t happen, though, because he’s one of the sweetest people I’ve ever worked with. Rade has a big heart, and there’s a lot of suffering in his face--he’s an odd combination of the old-fashioned romantic and something sort of beastly, and I think that’s the essence of his appeal. And he’s a fantastic, classically trained actor--his Hamlet is legendary in Yugoslavia.”

It was Serbedzija’s performance of “Hamlet” in Dubrovnik in 1974 that made him a star, but in light of recent developments, the chance of his ever performing it there again are slim.

Trouble began brewing in Yugoslavia in 1989 when the Communist Party lost most of the elections that year, and civil war broke out the next year when the Yugoslav Federation collapsed and the region splintered into five countries (Serbia-Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Macedonia and Slovenia).

On one level a religious war that pits Muslims against Christians, the fighting is also fueled by militant separatists demanding that the different peoples who long have lived peaceably together--Albanians, Serbs, Croats and Macedonians, among others--each have their own separate country.

Asked why there’s such a strong sense of ethnic identity in that part of the world, Serbedzija says, “That’s a question I ask myself and I don’t have an answer. Like the U.S., Yugoslavia was a country of multiculturalism, and for years many different cultures lived peacefully together.

“Now, these nationalists are trying to convince people that we’re all completely different--they’ve even gone so far as to search for new words and aspects of the language that are specific to each culture. Of course, they are stupid.

“The media play a huge role in the violence there,” he adds. “Nationalist propaganda on television, interspersed with terrible images of your people being killed--this is how hatred is inflamed.”

Born in Bunic, Croatia, in 1946, Serbedzija was the younger of two children born to a policeman and a kindergarten teacher, and was raised under communism.

“Yugoslavian communism was different from Russian communism--they were poor and we were not,” Serbedzija says. “We were happy people who lived well, and I had a wonderful life with everything I needed. The state cared about the people, and no one died in the streets as they do here. We had a safe country, and you could sleep in a park without fear of being robbed. So I was sorry to see communism go, and I was even more sorry to see what took its place. Unfortunately, the West chose to overlook the fact that war would inevitably come to Yugoslavia with the fall of communism.”

“My parents are Serbs who’d lived their entire lives in Croatia,” he continues. “Suddenly one night they had to leave their little house with their pictures and things and flee with nothing but the contents of two bags to Belgrade (now in Serbia). They live there now in a tiny apartment like two old, gray birds, looking from the window without any wish to go outside.”

At age 18, Serbedzija visited the United States for the first time, spending three months in Kansas City, Mo., and Los Angeles in 1964. On returning to Yugoslavia he enrolled at the Academy for Dramatic Arts in Zagreb (now in Croatia) and began landing parts in films while still in school.

“The Yugoslavian film industry had a golden period known as the Black Wave that began in the late ‘60s and was pretty much squelched by the state by 1972,” recalls Manchevski, who left Yugoslavia for his present home in New York in 1979.

“The films being made then weren’t overtly political, but they were critical of society, and Rade starred in several of them.”

It wasn’t until 1974, however, when Serbedzija played Hamlet that his career really kicked into gear--he appeared in the play to sold-out houses every summer for five years. By the time he left two years ago, he had starred in more than 40 Yugoslavian films, as well as two films that were released in the United States. (Menahem Golan’s “Hanna’s War” in 1988 and Dusan Makavejev’s 1989 film “Manifesto”).

Serbedzija’s memories of his life as an actor in Yugoslavia, however, pale next to the things he experienced there just before leaving.

“I was in Sarajevo to give a concert when war started on April 6, 1992,” recalls Serbedzija, whose fourth album, “Never Against the Friends I’ve Known,” was released that year.

“I was standing in a square when the shooting started, and I saw a man killed 10 feet from me--it was a terrible experience and I’ll never forget it. People fell to the ground in the street like animals or started running, but I stood there like a cowboy in a Western, unable to run.

“I think my response had something to do with being an actor--because fiction and reality are confused for actors, they have a hard time recognizing when they are in danger. Anyhow, I stood there with a friend of mine and finally said, ‘Well, shall we cross the street?’ He said, ‘Yes, let’s try.’ It was so real and so dangerous and so crazy of me to play Clint Eastwood at a moment like that.

“Anyhow, I left Sarajevo (now in Bosnia) for Serbia, where I was harassed by nationalists there. In May, my wife and I had our first child, and I was in a restaurant celebrating the birth of my daughter when some militant separatists started pointing guns at me,” says Serbedzija, whose wife, Lenka Udovicki, with whom he had a second child last year, is the niece of the president of Bolivia, Gonzalo Sanchez de Lozada. (The two met in Belgrade, where Udovicki was working with a theater company.)

“The next day, I received several threats, and at that point I decided to leave. I went to Vienna to appear in a production of ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,’ and from there I went to Slovenia, where my family and I lived in a hotel for two months.

“At that point I received an invitation from Anthony Andrews, who’d become a friend 10 years earlier when we worked together on ‘Hanna’s War,’ to come and stay with him in London for as long as I wanted. My wife is a theater director, and our plan was to organize some kind of artist protest while we were in London.

“When we explained to Tony what we wanted to do he said, ‘There’s only one person in the world who can help you: Vanessa Redgrave.’ We met, we talked, we became good friends, and we organized Wake Up World, a protest involving actors, philosophers and writers that took place in London in July, 1994.

“Vanessa’s like a sister to me now--in fact, my family and I are living in her apartment in London,” he adds. “Last year we did ‘Brecht in Exile’ with the Moving Theater, a company founded by Vanessa and Colin Redgrave, and this year I’ll appear opposite Vanessa in a production of ‘Antony and Cleopatra.’ Needless to say, I’m very proud to be working with her.”

In L.A. to meet with agents and generally work the room, Serbedzija doesn’t know exactly what he’ll do next. Asked if he could imagine living here, he says, “Yes, why not? People seem free to be whatever they want to be in America.

“Of course, I’d love to return to my country, to play in my own language and do films with my friends there, but I’ll probably never go back because I doubt that these bloody nationalists will be overthrown during my lifetime,” he says.

“When I lost my native country, I also lost my audience and my language, so the only choices left to me are to learn a new language and become an international actor, or stop with my profession.

“I could be a very good fisherman--I like boats and have spent a lot of time on the sea--but for now, I think I’ll continue working.”