3 November 1927 – 8 January 1967
Actors are divided into those who transform their personalities and
those who perpetuate them. I'm more interested in acting within certain
individual characteristics. I realise that it is both difficult and
dangerous…
Quoted in Film, No 2
[1987]
The death of renowned Polish theater and cinema actor Zbigniew Cybulski on 8 January 1967 marked the end of what had been Poland's post-war cinematic renaissance, drawing a line between the generation which had come of age under the shadow of Nazism and the generation which had come of age under the equally oppressive shadow of Josef Stalin.
Cybulski was the most charismatic and, as some critics have suggested, most emblematic representative of that earlier generation of actors, writers and directors, an artist who found international fame thanks to his era-defining role in Andrezj Wajda's 1958 masterpiece Popiól i diament [Ashes and Diamonds], only to perish after trying to leap aboard a moving train nine years later.
Cybulski's appearance in Popiól i diament, as the troubled young Home Army/anti-Communist assassin Maciek, was nothing short of electrifying. His performance earned him the (not altogether accurate) nickname 'The Polish James Dean' but it became a role that, as the years progressed, he found it increasingly difficult to disassociate himself from despite the fact that he appeared in more than twenty other feature films and many notable stage productions.
But it's not difficult to understand why the character of Maciek so thoroughly captivated post-war audiences both in Poland and abroad. Described by one Polish critic as a 'jazz existentialist,' Cybulski/Maciek seemed to personify the disaffection and unease of the Cold War 1950s, an idealist filled with doubt, searching for meaning and purpose in what had become a very restrictive society in which every aspect of life was dominated by Poland's Soviet-backed Communist Party. Cybulski's identification with the Maciek character was total, extending even to the outfit — jeans, jacket, white shirt, sunglasses — he wore onscreen. As the film's director Andrzej Wajda once explained in an interview: 'He wore his own clothes even though, historically, they were completely wrong… he rejected the costume we had prepared for him, he was in his own things with a small green haversack and that's how he came into the film…he wasn't able to think about the hero… as [being] anyone other than himself.'
DVD cover, date unspecified
Zbigniew Hubert Cybulski was born on 3 November 1927 in Kniażu, a small Polish village in what is now western Ukraine where his grandfather was a property owner. His family background was not in any way theatrical. His father Aleksander Cybulski (1896–1965) was an official in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs while his mother Ewa Jaruzelska (1903–1987) was a homemaker of Polish-Armenian descent. His younger brother Antoni (1931–2009) grew up to become a lawyer.
Cybulski was educated in the southwestern Polish town of Dzierżoniów, subsequently moving to Krakow to pursue further study in the Consular Department of that city's Academy of Commerce and then in the Journalism Department of the School of Social Sciences before transferring again to the National Art Academy from which he graduated as an actor in 1953. That year also saw him make his stage debut in the Polish port city of Gdańsk in Intrigue and Love, a 1784 play written by German poet and dramatist Friedrich Schiller.
In 1954 Cybulski obtained his first film role, appearing briefly but memorably in Andrzej Wajda's Pokoleniu [A Generation] alongside future controversial director Roman Polanski. Another small part in the spy thriller Kariera [Career], directed by Jan Koechera, followed, although his name did not appear in the film's credits.
1954 also saw him relocate semi-permanently to Gdańsk where he worked as a member of the Seashore Theater company and co-founded a student cabaret, called Bim-Bom, with his friend and future co-star Bogumił Kobiela. (Kobiela would appear alongside him in Popiól i diament and also die young as the result of an accident, in his case involving an automobile.) While not able to directly criticize the repressive state regime, Bim-Bom staged five productions between 1955 and 1960 that were notable for their tone of biting satire and their popularity with audiences both in Poland and in other European nations including France and Belgium. 'Bim-Bom was everything,' Cybulski would reminisce to a friend shortly before his death. 'Our mother, our brother, and our teacher. It was our bread. I don't know if it was theater, fun, a dream or a book…Through Bim-Bom I approached humanity.'
But it was in the world of cinema that Cybulski now began to distinguish himself as an actor, appearing as a cyclist in Trzy startsy [Three Starts] directed by Stanisław Lenartowicz and as a coalminer in Tajemnica dzikiego szybu [The Secret of the Wild Shaft] directed by Wadim Berestowski. In 1957, the same year he and Kobiela founded their experimental Rozmow theater company, he played the lead role in Koniec nocy [End of the Night], the tale of an unlikeable truckdriver who knocks down a pedestrian and eventually loses his job, only to sink into a life of alcoholism and petty thievery. His stage work continued to be equally impressive, culminating in him starring as drug addict Johnny Pope in the North American play A Hatful Of Rain under the direction of Andrzej Wajda, a production that travelled to several Polish cities in 1959 following the success of Popiól i diament and was acclaimed by critics and audiences alike.
The strength of Cybulski's performance in Koniec nocy earned him the lead role of Piotr Terlecki in Ósmy dzień tygodnia [The Eighth Day of the Week], directed by Alexsander Ford, the controversial story of frustrated young lovers trying to make a life for themselves in grey and grimy post-war Warsaw. Unfortunately, the film met with disapproval from the state censors following its premiere in West Germany and remained unreleased in Poland until 1983.
ZBIGNIEW CYBULSKI and SONJA ZIEMANN
The Eighth Day of the Week
1958
Cybulski's next major film role in Popiól i diament was one he nearly failed to get. Wajda's original choice for the part of the doomed Home Army soldier Maciek was Tadeusz Janczar, a choice he revised at the urging of his assistant director Janusz Morgenstern who would himself go on to direct Cybulski in Do widzenia, do jutra [Goodbye, See You Tomorrow] in 1960. Like Ósmy dzień tygodnia, Wajda's film created a lot of controversy upon its release, attracting criticism from the state authorities and from his fellow director Alexsander Ford who questioned the 'counter-revolutionary nature' of its plot and called for it to be banned.
Maciek is shown to be as much a victim of forces beyond his control as the Communist bureaucrat he's assigned (and initially fails) to assassinate, making him an immediately sympathetic figure and possibly explaining his popularity with Western audiences accustomed to seeing films featuring doomed anti-heroic leading characters. (This explains why Maciek was compared with Jim Stark, the character portrayed by James Dean in the 1955 film Rebel Without A Cause directed by Nicholas Ray. Cybulski allegedly attended a screening of Ray's film at Cannes and may have based aspects of his performance on that of the recently deceased Dean, although the two films have nothing in common politically and deal with very different subject matter.)
The film's plot also deviates significantly from the plot of the popular 1948 novel (by Jerzy Andrzejewski) from which it was adapted, making Maciek its protagonist rather than a supporting character and introducing a romantic subplot which sees the young man fall in love with a barmaid named Krystyna who is at first reluctant to become involved with him but to whom he promises to return following the completion of his mission.
Fortunately, Andrzejewski was respected enough as a cultural figure to be listened to when he insisted that the film was not anti-ideological and should be released without any cuts — a decision that saw it viewed by more than one million of his fellow Poles and go on to win an award at the Venice Film Festival after being banned and withdrawn from the Cannes competition. In recent years Popiól i diament has again become the subject of controversy for its 're-working' of the true events of 1945, the year in which it is set. It was in fact the Communists who hunted down and executed members of the Home Army rather than the other way round, a falsification of history that angered many Poles following the fall of Communism throughout Eastern Europe.
c 1962
To a large extent the remainder of Cybulski's film career was defined by his portrayal of Maciek, with many of the projects he starred in — Wajda's Niewinni czarodzieje [Innocent Sorcerers, 1960] and the aforementioned Do widzenia, do jutra [1960] (which he also had a hand in writing) — seeing him play characters who experience similar forms of existential angst and which, in some respects, challenge the romantic idealism presented in the character of the doomed young assassin. In Jak być kochaną [How To Be Loved], a 1962 production directed by Wojciech Has, Cybulski played Wiktor Rawicz, a wartime actor accused of killing a Nazi who is hidden by Felicja, a fellow actor who's in love with him, in her room. When the war ends Rawicz flees her apartment to seek the fame he feels he's been wrongly denied by the war, only to see Felicja accused of collaboration because she took a job in a German-run theater to prevent him from being discovered and arrested by the Nazis. Rawicz fails to find success and becomes a hopeless alcoholic who, after being found by Felicja in a grubby bar, is taken back to her apartment where, once more faced with the prospect of living there indefinitely, he kills himself by leaping from its window. The bar scene is a direct parody of a similar scene in Popiól i diament between Maciek and his lover Krystyna, designed to contrast the former's idealism with Rawicz's unappealing venality.
Cybulski appeared in many more films as the 1960s progressed, including the 1964 Swedish drama Att Älska [To Love] and the bizarre 1965 historical satire Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie [The Saragossa Manuscript], adapted from the 1815 novel by Jan Potocki in which he portrayed the Napoleonic army captain Alfons van Worden — one of the few roles for which he did not wear his trademark tinted eyeglasses. Always in demand, Cybulski acted in nine more films and two television dramas over the next two years, combining this with work in radio and theater as he had done throughout most of his career.
Ironically, the theater offered him a wider range of roles and also gave him the chance to direct, including a well received adaptation of Ernest Hemingway's 1938 play The Fifth Column in which he played the leading role of Philip Rawlings. Nor was that his only venture into Western drama. In addition to The Fifth Column and his earlier starring role in Michael Vincent Gazzo's A Hatful of Rain Cybulski also performed in Polish adaptations of works by William Gibson, William Faulkner, Terence Rattigan, Truman Capote and British screenwriters Ken Hughes and Philip Mackie.
The actor's hectic work schedule was partly responsible for his unexpected death. Long known as 'a man in a hurry' to his friends, he frequently ran late for professional appointments and was often in the habit of arriving at railway stations at the last minute and leaping aboard moving trains as they were pulling out from the platform. (He also did this in several films, beginning with his cinematic debut in Pokoleniu [A Generation] and ending with Salto [Jump] in 1965.) This was what he did on 8 January 1967 at Wrocław Główny railway station in an effort to board the 'Odra' express to Warsaw so he could begin rehearsals at a television studio after completing principal photography on what was to be his final film Morderca zostawia ślad [The Murderer Leaves a Trace]. Unfortunately, Cybulski misjudged the distance between the carriage and the platform and tumbled into the gap. His body was struck by the next oncoming carriage, causing major damage to his head, chest and liver. Although he was rushed to hospital where he immediately underwent emergency surgery, the extent and severity of his injuries saw him die within an hour.
The untimely passing of Zbigniew Cybulski was viewed as a national tragedy in Poland where he remains a revered and much loved artist to this day, with the government choosing to honour his life and artistic legacy by naming an acting prize in his honor. He was survived by his wife Elżbieta Chwalibóg, a set designer he married on 30 August 1960, and their son Maciej (1961–2019) and buried in his family tomb in the southern city of Katowice after two separate funeral services — the Catholic ceremony preferred by his relatives and the secular ceremony preferred by the Communist Party. In 2007 a stone with a cross and a bas-relief of his face were placed on the tomb to mark the fortieth anniversary of his death. Ceremonies were also held in 2017 to mark the fiftieth anniversary of that tragic event.
Perhaps the most fascinating tribute to Cybulski was the film Wszystko na sprzedaż [Everything For Sale] made in 1968 by his old friend and collaborator Andrzej Wajda. The film, one of the director's best, explores the efforts made by a group of actors to complete a project starring a deceased colleague, a man who died in circumstances that remain unclear and cause them to question their own careers, relationships and personal and professional motivations. The film has a quasi-documentary feel to it and perfectly mirrors the situation Wajda found himself in at the time of Cybulski's passing. It is well worth seeking out by anyone interested in the idea of celebrity and the mythical status some performers attain following their deaths.
Use the link below to view a series of interviews with ANDRJEZ WAJDA (with English subtitles) in which he discusses the life, work and legacy of Polish film, television, radio and theater actor ZBIGNIEW CYBULSKI:
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