ŁUKASZEWICZ, OLGIERD

(1946-)

   Accomplished film and theatrical actor. After graduating from the Kraków State Acting School (PWST) in 1968, Łukaszewicz, a native of Silesia, starred in Kazimierz Kutz's Salt of the Black Earth (1970). He played the youngest Basista son, Gabryel, participating in the 1920 Silesian Uprising. In the second part of Kutz's Silesian trilogy, The Pearl in the Crown (1972), he continued Gabryel's role, this time as a young miner participating in a hunger strike in the 1930s Silesia.In 1970 Łukaszewicz also had a lead role in Andrzej Wajda's Birchwood, in which he played a character dying of tuberculosis who has just returned from a sanatorium in Switzerland to spend the last moments of his life with his brother (Daniel Olbrychski). Later he played similar characters in Janusz Majewski's The Lesson of a Dead Language (1979) and Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue 2 (1988)—an uhlan lieutenant dying of tuberculosis in a small Carpathian town during the demise of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and a dying husband, respectively.

   Łukaszewicz proved to be a versatile actor. In historical films he played idealistic characters, as in Stanisław Różewicz's The Romantics (1970), but also villainous types, for example in Walerian Borow-czyk's The Story of Sin (1975), Agnieszka Holland's Fever (1981), and Filip Bajon's The Magnate (1987). Łukaszewicz also successfully acted in comedy, for example in Juliusz Machulski's Sex Mission (1984). In 1995 he starred in two notable films: as a high-ranked Catholic priest persecuted by the Stalinist regime in Barbara Sass's Temptation (1995) and as a Pole trying to save his Jewish lover in Ryszard Brylski's Holocaust drama Deborah (1995). His twin brother, Jerzy Łukaszewicz, is a respected cinematographer and director.

   Historical Dictionary of Polish Cinema by Marek Haltof