Maja Komorowska

Komorowska has achieved wide visibility onstage and on TV in her native land. Only her film work, though, has really traveled, and she has performed for some of Poland's leading filmmakers, including Andrzej Wajda (in his bizarre adaptation of the verse play "The Wedding" 1972) and Krzysztof Kieslowski (part one of his "Decalogue" series, 1988). Reteaming with Wajda for "Panny z Wilka/The Young Ladies of Wilko" (1979), Komorowska played a typical role as one of five sisters enduring the anguish of old maidhood. Her most important cinematic collaboration, though, has been with Krzysztof Zanussi. Komorowska has been a leading muse for Zanussi almost from the start of his career in films from "Zycie Rodzinne/Family Life" and the atypical comedy of "Za Sciana/Behind the Wall" (both 1971) to his idiosyncratic take on "Blaubart/Bluebeard" (1984). Some of her more striking roles have included a deceptive baroness in "Wege in der Nacht/Night Paths" (1979), a war widow who meets an emotionally blocked American soldier in the touching "Rok Spokonjnego Slonca/The Year of the Quiet Son" (1984), and a mother who forms an odd triangle with her son and an older woman in the psychodrama "State of Possession" (1989). Less active in film in the 90s, Komorowska continued stage and TV work, and also taught at the famed Warsaw Drama School. She marked a splendid return to form as a boy's free-spirited, horse-loving aunt during Poland's Stalinist 50s in Zanussi's autobiographical "At Full Gallop" (1996).