Daniel Olbrychski has been the most popular Polish actor for many decades and at the same time has had an important international career; in this program of his films the only director with two titles is the greatest Polish author Andrzej Wajda who has played a key role in Olbrychski’s career
Even though Olbrychski first appeared on television as a high school student reciting poetry and then made his acting debut in 1964 as a first year student in the film by Janusz Nasfeter Ranny w lesie, he gained popularity in 1965 after acting in Wajda’s The Ashes (Popioly), action drama set in the time of Napoleon’s wars. Thanks to his attractive looks and acting talent he managed to successfully create the character of a romantic Polish national hero, a character he later portrayed in films by Jerzy Hofman based on novels by Henryk Sienkiewicz Pan Wolodyjowski (1969), shown in our country as Mali vitez and The Deluge (Potop, 1974). As such he was a polar opposite to the most popular actor of that time – the charismatic Zbigniew Cybulski (1927 – 1967) who also became famous after starring in Wajda’s Ashes and Diamonds (1958). He became known all over the world as the ”eastern James Dean“, a representative of the young, rebellious and disillusioned generation. Cybulski and Olbrychski starred together in one film – in Janusz Morgenstern’s Jowita (1967).
After Cybulski’s tragic death in a train accident, Wajda directed the in memoriam to his favorite actor Everything For Sale (Wszystko na sprzedaz, 1968), starring Olbrychski and that was the first step in achieving the popularity of his predecessor. He was furthermore supported by Wajda who gave him different, more complex roles in his films from the early 1970’s, which we will see in this program. Some of these are Landscape After the Battle (shown within the official competition program in Cannes) in which Olbrychski portrays a poet who leaves a concentration camp and tries to find a reason to continue living, and The Birch Wood, drama set in Poland between the two world wars about a musician who is dying of tuberculosis and returns to live in a village. This film won the main award at the Moscow Film Festival and Olbrychski was awarded as best actor. In just a few years, he demonstrated his ability to portray very diverse characters, witnessed by his outstanding role of an intellectual caught in serious problems in Krzysztof Zanussi’s film Family Life (1970) and roles in several films directed by the Hungarian director Miklós Jancs, best among them being Agnus Dei (1970).
Perhaps most helpful for his international acclaim was another film by Wajda, produced in West Germany, Pilatus und andere - Ein Film für Karfreitag (1971), while he became an international star after starring in the German film The Tin Drum (1979) by Volker Schlöndorff, which won an Oscar in the category Best Foreign Film. Another important film he filmed in Germany was the biopic Rosa Luxemburg (1986) by Margarethe von Trotta. He also starred in 1981 in Lordan Zafranović’s Pad Italije (1981), and over the years starred in films produced in many different European countries, such as France (e.g. Les uns et les autres, 1981, by Claude Lelouche and La Truite, 1982, by Joseph Losey), Italy (Farewell Moscow, 1987, by Maur Bolognini) and Russia (his most successful film filmed in Russia was Nikita Mihalkov’s The Barber of Siberia, 1998). Even though he never attempted to try to make a name for himself in Hollywood, he starred in Philip Kaufman’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988), based on the novel by Milan Kundera.
Throughout his career he made films in his native Poland, where he is still active and stars in several films each year that help grow his opus of more than one hundred and fifty films. A number of outstanding roles prove that he is one of the most important Polish and European actors. (Tomislav Kurelec)