DEMANDING ACTRESS WHO DELIGHTS A DIRECTOR

Two things were uppermost in Polish actress Maja Komorowska’s mind as she sat in a Chateau Marmont suite ready to be interviewed. First, she was concerned that her director Krzysztof Zanussi translate her every nuance; second, she did not want to come across as a bore.

“Believe me, it’s far easier to direct her than to translate her,” said the multilingual Zanussi, joking. (This is the man, after all, who has done instantaneous translations from Russian to English of the ideas and philosophies of the great Russian experimentalist Andrei Tarkovsky.)

The 10 films that Komorowska, one of Europe’s finest stage and screen actresses, and Zanussi have made together in the last 15 years have been among the best to come from Poland.

In their newest, “A Year of the Quiet Sun” (at the Beverly Center Cineplex), Komorowska portrays a Polish woman who falls in love with an American soldier (Scott Wilson) in the grim aftermath of World War II. Made quietly--and not without bureaucratic hassles, “A Year of the Quiet Sun” is believed to be the first Polish-American co-production.

Their previous collaboration was “Ways in the Night,” in which Komorowska played a proud, defiant aristocratic Pole whose estate has been commandeered during World War II by a sophisticated German officer (Matthieu Carriere), who falls in love with her.

You need be only briefly in the company of these two people, now both in their 40s, before understanding why they complement each other so well. They’re like Shaw and Mrs. Patrick Campbell: the handsome, bearded Zanussi supplies the intellectual detachment, the beautiful, pale blond Komorowska provides the emotional impact. Together, they’re a witty, impassioned team: dedicated artists who have never compromised, no matter how difficult the circumstances in the country they both clearly love.

They met in 1968, just as Komorowska was nearing the end of six years with the prestigious acting company of Jerzy Grotowski, the international theater director, teacher and drama theorist. “It’s a long story, how we met,” began Komorowska, charmingly animated in an elegant gown of white satin and crepe.

“But how do you make a painting short? There was no time for films with Grotowski. For five or six hours a day you do yoga and study voice and movement. I wore no makeup, I dressed very plainly. It’s like being in a nunnery.

‘We didn’t try to charm anybody, we were so egocentric, so attached to our profession. Yet when I learned that Krzysztof wanted to meet me, I must admit that subconsciously I must not have been that indifferent to working in films because I prepared very thoroughly for our meeting. I wanted to show him somebody with lots of makeup, a dress with bright colors, very decollete. In the mirror I thought I was an illusion. I remember his eyes: I could recognize in his eyes that I was not the actress he was looking for.

“But he was not what I expected either. I was expecting a real artist looking like a real artist. And here was this man with a briefcase ! He must be a banker or a scientist! (Zanussi, a man who wears a suit and tie to a picnic, in fact studied physics before turning to film.) He definitely did not look like an artist! There was such a contrast between us.

“What happened next we later used in a film. I had borrowed an antique armchair, broken but held together with string. I thought it would look good in my tiny home. He sat down and the chair collapsed--and he pretended nothing happened!”

Komorowska wasn’t in fact the actress Zanussi was looking for at that time, and although she thought she would never hear from him again, he wrote a role especially for her in “Family Life” (1971), a drama of the decline of the aristocracy in which she played an incipient Blanche DuBois.

Although Komorowska felt the need to move on just at the moment Grotowski began to be an international celebrity, she constantly draws upon what she learned from him. “What I owe him is a certain inner technique in building up a part,” she said. “Due to his training, I managed to get in control of my body. Grotowski concentrates on the inner life first--movement, gestures will follow. That is what I am now teaching at my theater academy in Warsaw.

“Also I learned: Don’t do whatever is predictable! There are many possible true reactions--being unexpected is as important as being true. Whenever a director forces on you a text that calls for a banal reaction, the only alternative is to get some distance from it and find a way to make a comment on it. You’ve got to show your embarrassment before the audience shows its embarrassment.

“Would you permit an example from ‘A Year of the Quiet Sun’? I’m so proud of it! Do you remember the last conversation between me and Scott? I must say, in English, ‘You can find happiness even in sorrow.’ I find this embarrassing, I did not want to memorize it. Krzysztof and I, we argue a lot! But he let me write it down on a scrap of paper and read it in my halting English. In this way I saved my dignity. See, I commented on myself before you could! Then Krzysztof wanted me crying when I buried my mother. I was so furious about being forced to do this I decided to take out my anger and frustration in having to dig through the frozen earth with just a spade. I knew from Grotowski how to take advantage of this fury and put it into the part. I still refused to cry; instead, I kept pushing my hair out of my eyes. I want to give you the same truth in our conversation. If you feel no tension, it will be such a terrible boredom for you!

“I often struggle against props, against costumes. I deserve my reputation as being a difficult actress, but I really don’t struggle against the director but against myself.” Only three days after this interview, Komorowska, who gave up her career during martial law in Poland to visit and deliver packages to political prisoners, would be opening in Warsaw as Olga in Chekhov’s “Three Sisters.”

“This is my latest fight,” she said. “I play a good, warm-hearted woman, which is always so boring, so I have to make a great effort to overcome this by bringing an ironic distance to it. Olga is usually played as a pulled-together, resigned woman. So I try to be relaxed, always laughing, which makes the ending much more tragic. (This despite being told by her director to forget the old adage that Chekhov regarded his plays as comedies rather than tragedies.) The danger in ‘The Three Sisters’ is to play the first act like the third.

“I have to say to my sister Irina to marry the baron--’you respect him’--not for love but to fulfill destiny.” Komorowska then demonstrated how she’s going to handle this line, first by saying it matter-of-factly, and then with her interpretation. She spoke it with growing impatience and self-disgust at having to give such contemptible, nonsensical advice. So eloquent was Komorowska that translation was scarcely necessary.

Komorowska, whose husband is an attorney, at first thought of pursuing a medical career, and it was putting on puppet shows for handicapped children that led her to the theater. Proudly she drew from her purse two snapshots of her own 21-year-old son, who is taking a year off from his studies in philosophy at the University of Warsaw to stay in Los Angeles with her co-star Scott Wilson, intending to master English. (Earlier in the day, Komorowska swam in the ocean with him and rode with him on a motorcycle.) The photos showed a handsome, bare-chested blond on a sailboat, just the kind of shots you send off to casting directors and agents, but Komorowska said he has no interest in acting--”Thank God!”

“I put as much heart into my cooking and cleaning as I do acting,” she said. “Many times I have wanted to quit, but my friends have told me that I will never be free of myself, whether I’m cooking or whatever. So I might as well keep on acting!”