Mira Furlan, ‘Lost’ Actress, Dead at 65

Mira Furlan, an actress known for her roles as Danielle Rousseau on Lost and Delenn on Babylon 5, died Wednesday at the age of 65. Furlan’s Twitter account announced the news Thursday with a quote from the actress about going into the “clear night” and the dates of her birth and death. No cause of death has been announced by her friends or family at this time.

Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski shared a tribute to the actress later in the evening. While he also didn’t share many details of Furlan’s health before her death, Straczynski said the cast and crew of Babylon 5 had “known for some time now that Mira’s health was fading.” He continued, “We kept hoping that she would improve. In a group email sent to the cast a while back, I heard that she might be improving.”

Despite the hopeful news, Straczynski said he got the call later from Furlan’s co-star, Peter Jurasik, that her husband, director Goran Gajić, was “bringing her home.” Straczynski had nothing but kind words for Furlan as he remembered her life and career. “Mira was a good and kind woman, a stunningly talented performer, and a friend to everyone in the cast and crew of Babylon 5, and we are all devastated by the news,” he wrote, asking for “room to process this moment” for the cast and crew members who became “especially close” to Furlan since the show’s end: “We have been down this road too often, and it only gets harder.”

Furlan, who was born in 1955 in the former Yugoslavia, was part of the Croatian National Theatre and starred in a number of successful stage productions before coming to the U.S. in 1991. She would star in all five seasons of Babylon 5 in the 1990s. She also appeared on ABC’s Lost as Danielle Rousseau, a scientist who had been marooned on the show’s mysterious island more than a decade before Oceanic Flight 815 crashed.