Janda, Krystyna

(1952-)

   One of Poland's leading actresses, Janda was voted the best Polish actress in 1989 and 1992 in a poll conducted by the weekly Film. In 1996 she was voted by Film readers the best actress in the history of Polish cinema. She rose to stardom almost overnight after playing Agnieszka in Andrzej Wajda's Man of Marble (1977), a young film director who uncovers the Stalinist era in Poland while making her diploma film. She continued that role in the equally well-known sequel, Man of Iron (1981). After appearing in two other films by Wajda, an episodic role in Rough Treatment (1978) and the leading one in The Orchestra Conductor (1980), her screen persona was established. She became known for playing women who were independent and forceful; with actor Jerzy Radziwiłowicz she became one of the most recognizable faces of the new Polish cinema.

   During the Solidarity period she appeared in several films directed by Piotr Szulkin and also in the internationally known Mephisto (1981), directed by Hungarian Istvan Szabó. Her finest screen performance, however, was in Ryszard Bugajski's Interrogation (1982/1989), where she played an innocent young woman wrongly charged by the Stalinist secret police. For this role she received several awards, including the distinction of Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival in 1990. After the introduction of martial law in 1981, Janda mostly appeared in films made abroad—in France, West Germany, Italy, and Austria—among them in Helma Sanders-Brahms's Laputa (1986). In 1987 she starred once again with Radziwiłowicz in Waldemar Krzystek's Suspended (1987), a film about the everyday ugliness of Stalinism and its impact on ordinary yet heroic people. In the late 1980s, she also acted in Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue 2 and Krzysztof Zanussi's Inventory (1989). In 1995 Janda directed and starred with Daniel Olbrychski in her own film, Pip (Pestka). Later, she directed, cowrote, and acted in the television series Masculine-Feminine (Męskie-Żeńskie, 2003-2004) together with her daughter, actress Maria Seweryn. In recent years, Janda has appeared in films by Zanussi (Life as a Fatal Sexually Transmitted Disease, 2000) and Filip Bajon (Early Spring, 2001) and received an award at the Festival of Polish Films for her role as a blind female poet in Several People, Little Time (2005), directed by Andrzej Barański. In addition, Janda is an accomplished theatrical actress in Warsaw; she has also appeared in more than fifty productions of television theater.

   Historical Dictionary of Polish Cinema by Marek Haltof