Tyszkiewicz, Beata

(1938-)

   Film actress, often labeled the "grande dame of Polish cinema," Tyszkiewicz appeared in more than one hundred films and several television series. Her debut came in 1957 with the costume adaptation Revenge (Zemsta, 1957), directed by Antoni Bohdziewicz and Bohdan Korzeniewski, where she starred alongside the legends of Polish theater Jacek Woszczerowicz and Jan Kurnakowicz. At the beginning of the 1960s, she appeared in several lead roles, for example in Jan Rybkowski's Tonight the City Will Die (1961) as a young German woman in bombarded Dresden and in his Truly Yesterday (1963) as an art history student. She also starred in Jan Batory's Visit of a President (1961) and Meeting with a Spy (1964) and in Aleksander Ford's The First Day of Freedom (1964). She also played a strong supporting role as a young partisan nurse in Tadeusz Konwicki's All Souls' Day (1961).

   Tyszkiewicz's aristocratic background and her beauty and freshness proved to be ideally suited for historical costume films. She shone in such films made in Poland and abroad. For example, she starred in Leonard Buczkowski's Maria and Napoleon (1966) and excelled in Wojciech J. Has's epic adaptation of The Doll (1968), where she played an aristocratic young lady, Countess Izabela Łęcka. She was cast in a similar role in a Russian film directed by Andrei Konchalovsky, A Nest of Gentry (1969), and in Wojciech Solarz's television costume melodrama Balzak's Great Love (Wielka miłość Balzaka, 1973, Polish-French coproduction).

   Tyszkiewicz also appeared in films directed by Andrzej Wajda, such as the historical epic Ashes (1965) and the self-reflexive Everything for Sale (1969), in the latter as Beata, the film director's wife (she was Wajda's wife in real life from 1967 to 1968). In addition, she acted in several films made abroad in Hungary, Belgium, Bulgaria, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, France, and Russia. She had lead roles in Jan Zeman's The Devil's Smile (1987, Czechoslovakia) and Igor Gostev's European Story (1984, Soviet Union). In Poland she appeared in Grzegorz Królikiewicz's Dancing Hawk (1978) as Wiesława, the city wife of the ambitious villager Toporny, and had strong supporting roles in Juliusz Machulski's films made in the 1980s: Sex Mission (1984), Va banque II (1985), and King-Size (1987). Since 1990 she has appeared in more than twenty-five films and several television series playing various roles. For example, she played an earthy provincial woman in Wojciech Nowak's merciless satire Death of the Kidsmaker (Smierć dziecioroba, 1991) and Berta Sonnenbruch (the professor's wife) in Zbigniew Kaminski's adaptation of Leon Kruczkowski's drama Germans (Niemcy, 1996), for which she received an acting award at the Festival of Polish Films.

   Historical Dictionary of Polish Cinema by Marek Haltof