Born to father Mensur Kurić from Niš whose family traces its origins to Donji Vakuf in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Sarajevo-born mother Nada Wasche of Czech and Hungarian descent,[1] Irfan grew up in Sarajevo's Dolac Malta neighbourhood.
[2] Encouraged by his stage actress stepmother, young Irfan began pursuing performing arts after, by own admission, setting foot inside a theater for the first time at age 16.
Directed by Veljko Bulajić and featuring a cast headed by prominent, globally-known actors Christopher Plummer, Florinda Bolkan, and Maximilian Schell, the film about the 1914 assassination of the Austro-Hungarian archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo was an ambitious and generously funded project that ended up securing a theatrical release in a number of countries.
For his part, in later interviews, Mensur talked about being extremely dissatisfied with his own performance in the high-profile movie that "marked me in the Yugoslav public consciousness to the point of forcing me to have to go around convincing different film and TV people [in Yugoslavia] that I'm actually not a bad actor".
[4] In 1976, at the height of his Beach Guard in Winter popularity in Yugoslavia, twenty-four-year-old Mensur married the twenty-three-year-old Trebinje-born model Ljiljana Perović who had, much like him, also spent her childhood in Sarajevo before ending up in Belgrade in pursuit of a show business career.