przez Krystyna Janda So, 19.06.2010 04:46
Tak, dostałam ten amerykański artykuł.
Elzbieta Czyzewska, Polish Actress Unwelcome in Her Own Country, Dies at 72
By BRUCE WEBER
Elzbieta Czyzewska, a star of Polish movies and television in the 1960s whose marriage to the American journalist David Halberstam made her an outcast in her home country, and whose career frustrations in the United States became a cautionary tale for immigrant artists, died on Thursday in Manhattan. She was 72.
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The Museum of Modern Art
Elzbieta Czyzewska in the 1961 film “Erotica” by Jerzy Skolimowski, which made her a national sex symbol in Poland.
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Carol Rosegg/'Big Potato'
Elzbieta Czyzewska and Paul Hecht in “Big Potato” in Manhattan in 2000.
Her death, at New York Presbyterian Hospital, was caused by esophageal cancer, said Nancy Weber, a friend.
In the 1960s Ms. Czyzewska (her name is pronounced elzh-BYET-uh Chuh-ZHEF-skuh) was, quite simply, the most popular actress in Poland, creating, in comic and dramatic roles, a consistent persona that was both fiercely feminine and fiercely independent. “Pride of Her Generation” was the caption with her photograph, in 1965, on the cover of a Polish national news magazine.
But her life took a turn the same year, when she starred in a production of “After the Fall,” Arthur Miller’s dramatized account of a marriage, seemingly drawn from his to Marilyn Monroe. It was a significant cultural event in Warsaw, and Mr. Halberstam, a correspondent there for The New York Times, interviewed her, attended the opening and danced with her at the cast party. They married a few months later.
It was later that year, after Mr. Halberstam wrote an article about anti-Semitism in Poland, that he was accused of slander against the government and subsequently expelled from the country. Ms. Czyzewska eventually joined him in New York, but in 1968 she returned to Warsaw to make a film with the celebrated director Andrzej Wajda, “Everything for Sale.” Mr. Wajda was denounced for hiring her, and in a letter published on the front page of a state-run daily newspaper, she was denounced as well. After the film was completed, she did not return to Poland until the 1980s, long after her marriage to Mr. Halberstam — who went on to become a best-selling author — had dissolved. He was killed in a car accident in 2007.
Ms. Czyzewska had early stage successes in the United States, most notably in a 1974 production of “The Possessed,” Albert Camus’s adaptation of the Dostoyevsky novel about violent nihilists in 19th-century Russia. Directed by Mr. Wajda at the Yale Repertory Theater, it featured a cast of then unknowns — Meryl Streep and Christopher Durang among them — and Ms. Czyzewska, who played a crippled woman, seemingly mad, in a performance that was singled out by critics and is still remembered by theater scholars.
“I can still see her hands, her fluttering hands, and those staring eyes,” Robert Brustein, then head of the Yale Rep, said about Ms. Czyzewska’s performance, 14 years later, in New York magazine. In a telephone interview Thursday, Annette Insdorf, a film professor at Columbia, recalled the same performance. “I was haunted by it,” she said.
But Ms. Czyzewska was hampered by her accent and her Eastern European speech patterns — which one biographer of William Styron, who knew her, said Styron had appropriated for the title character of “Sophie’s Choice” — and never had the opportunities to achieve stardom in America.
Her luck, in fact, was legendarily bad. In the mid-1980s, she was cast in the original production, in Woodstock, N.Y., of “Hunting Cockroaches,” Janusz Glowacki’s dark comedy about a Polish émigré couple — a writer and an actress — who are being stifled in New York City. She was Mr. Glowacki’s adviser on the project, and the role was at least in part derived from her circumstances. But when the show opened in Manhattan, the director, Arthur Penn, cast Dianne Wiest.
Ms Czyzewska was said to be the model for the title character in the 1987 film “Anna,” an “All About Eve”-ish tale about an actress, once famous in Eastern Europe, whose life has become a struggle in New York and who opens her home to a younger émigré actress, a version of herself, who succeeds suddenly and spectacularly.
The filmmaker, a young Pole, Yurek Bogayevicz, interviewed Ms. Czyzewska extensively before offering the role to Sally Kirkland (who received an Academy Award nomination for her performance), and though he changed the character’s nationality — Anna is Czech — he caught the tenor of Ms. Czyzewska’s life in New York and based the film on an actual episode:
In 1982, a young Polish actress who knew Ms. Czyzewska only by reputation appeared on her doorstep. Ms. Czyzewska took her in. Shortly thereafter, the young woman, Joanna Pacula, won the lead female role opposite William Hurt in the film “Gorky Park.”
Elzbieta Justyna Czyzewska was born in Warsaw on April 14, 1938. Her father, Jan, was killed in World War II; her mother, Jadwiga Gimpel, was a locally renowned seamstress. She graduated from theater school in Warsaw and from 1960, when she appeared in a short film, “Erotique,” directed by Jerzy Skolimowski, she became a national sex symbol. She and Mr. Skolimowski were a celebrated couple and perhaps husband and wife.
“I am pretty sure they were married,” Magdalena Komorek, Ms. Czyzewska’s niece, wrote in an e-mail message. Ms. Komorek said she was her aunt’s only surviving relative.
As an actress in the United States, Ms. Czyzewska had a respectable résumé. She had small, sometimes memorable roles — she tended to be cast as landladies, cleaning women and the like, bit parts that capitalized on her accent — in films like “Putney Swope,” “Running on Empty,” “Cadillac Man” and “A Kiss Before Dying.”
On television, she did a comic turn as a Dr. Ruth Westheimer-like sex therapist on “Sex and the City”; she appeared in “Third Watch,” “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” and “Damages,” among other TV shows. And she often appeared in Off Broadway plays.
Throughout her life she was a central figure in the community of Polish artists in New York.
“Hers is one of the most poignant stories,” Ms. Insdorf said. “Unfortunately, she never had the opportunity to display all her gifts here. But I would always see her at events involving the Polish film community, and she was treated with tremendous reverence. She was, everyone recognized, a queen without a country.”
