‘Go West, Young Man’: It Paid Off for Polish Actor

“I didn’t speak English until three years ago,” Polish actor Andrzej Seweryn says. “But thanks to Peter Brook, I have that weapon in my pocket. Now, maybe, I can work in America.”

Seweryn learned English at Brook’s behest while working 41 months in the director’s French and English stage productions of “The Mahabharata.” This sprawling tale about two royal families is the national epic of India. Seweryn visited Los Angeles with the nine-hour play in 1987, and now he stars in the three-hour film version that opened Friday.

“I play Yudhishthira, the good king,” Seweryn says. “ ‘The Mahabharata’ is one of the three things most important in my life.” The other two: Andrzej Wajda’s Oscar-nominated film “The Promised Land” (1976) and Wajda’s “Orchestra Conductor,” for which Seweryn won the best-actor prize at the 1980 Berlin Film Festival.

Seweryn has always looked to the West. “In my youth we wanted to be America’s 51st state,” he recalls. “In Poland, your life is very organized. You can’t be an actor without going to drama school. Doing Shakespeare, they tell you, ‘Make this gesture. Stand this way.’ That kind of routine kills all the art.”

In 1980, Seweryn followed Wajda to France to film “Man of Iron.” “While I was away, the political situation in Poland changed,” he says, “so I decided to stay away. I had been a member of Solidarity, although not in the first ranks. I helped found the Committee on Solidarity in Paris.”

Currently in a Paris production of Bertolt Brecht’s “The Good Woman of Szechuan,” he still hopes to work in Hollywood. “We who come from small countries must make extra efforts,” says Seweryn, who also speaks Russian. “America has very good actors, but maybe they’ll need me for a film about Eastern Europe.”