A Polish girl with long braids, Anna, was eleven years old when the Second World War exploded in 1939.
Thus her dreams of becoming an actress were vanquished.
Anna’s father was deported to camps in Siberia, notorious Gulag while Anna with her mother had to endure years of Nazi oppression on their own.
They were often hungry, wore wooden clogs even in a middle of winter, wrapped themselves in coats made from old blankets and feared extermination at any time. In 1944, with war still raging in the western Poland, seventeen years old Anna was welcomed to study in a newly open Drama College in Krakow.
Since then Anna Lutoslawska played over one hundred leading roles in plays by William Shakespeare, Berthold Brecht, Juliusz Slowacki in great theatres as well as in her own adaptations from Thomas Mann and others. Multiple awards, film roles and books followed, while Anna’s creative work continues, as she is performing all over Poland.
This poster is based on a photograph I took of Anna Lutoslawska, in a role of Rose in “The Foreigner”, a play, which subsequently went on a tour throughout Poland and was brought to London too.
For a while the chief editor of British Vogue, Beatrix Miller, kept this poster on a wall in her office, in London.
Anna Lutosławska, an actress, 1927-2022