Born Olga Palinkaš in Zagreb to a Hungarian father and a Croatian mother, Kodar was the partner and lover of Orson Welles during the final years of his life. They met in Zagreb in 1961, when Welles was in town filming The Trial. Forty-six-year-old Welles, at the time married to his third wife Paola Mori, took a liking to the twenty-year-old "dark, beautiful and exotic-looking" Palinkaš. Soon after they began their relationship, Welles gave her a stage name Oja Kodar, which is a mixture of the name 'Oja' given by her sister Nina and the Croatian expression 'ko-dar' (as a present).