Polish actress Elżbieta Czyżewska, a star of many movie in the 1960s 70‘s and 80s, has died in a New York hospital at the age seventy two.

She moved to the United States in 1967 at the peak of her spectacular career in both films and the theatre, following the expulsion from Poland of her husband, the American journalist David Halberstam.

In the 1960s she starred in thirty films, including Andrzej Wajda’s Everything for Sale and Wojciech Has’s The Saragossa Manuscript. Her successful performance as Marylin Monroe in the Polish premiere of Arthur Miller’s After the Fall won her the name ‘a Polish Marylin Monroe’.

In the United States, Czyżewska continued to work in the theatre and films but her strong accent prevented her from scoring the successes commensurate with her great talent. However, she won an Obie Award for her role in Crowbar by Mac Wellman, and performed at the American Repertory Theatre and Yale Repertory Theater.

She also acted in films (The Music Box, Running on Empty). Following he role in exiled Polish director Aleksander Ford’s adaptation of Solzhenitsyn’s The First Circle in the late 1960, she was unable to work in Poland until the Solidarity revolution of 1980.

The Polish writer Janusz Głowacki, who knew Czyżewska for five decades, told Gazeta Wyborcza: “Her life was made up of great successes and severe defeats, scores of men and loneliness. In the 1980s, in Woodstock, N.Y. she gave a great performance in my play Hunting Cockroaches. But when the play opened in Manhattan, Arthur Penn, the director, cast Oscar winner Dianne Wiest.” (mk)

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