The Man in the Green Lenses

Zbigniew Cybulski may have an unpronounceable name, but women in a couple of dozen countries have developed a sudden passion for linguistics in order to fondle his exotic consonants. Poland's Cybulski, now 37, is the first international film star, in the celebrity sense, to come from behind the Iron Curtain. He first became known in the West when his Polish pictures The Generation and Eighth Day of the Week won critical praise in Western countries and Ashes and Diamonds took numerous festival prizes. Now he has begun to appear in films made in Western nations. His newest is To Love, a Swedish valediction forbidding the death of sex, in which Cybulski and Sweden's Harriet Andersson spend four-fifths of their time inventively in bed (TIME, Dec. 4).

The trademark of Zbigniew (say Zbig-nieff) Cybulski has been his sunglasses with green lenses--worn all the time, day and night, interior or exterior. The glasses rest on the bridge of a nose that is short and running to pug, and behind them is the meaty face of an unusually handsome center linebacker, so it is not surprising that the only film in which he has ever shed his shades is To Love, and then only for those moments when they would have been a hindrance to sensuality. But in his next Polish picture, Manuscript Found in he plays a Catalonian army captain, and has been forced to abandon his glasses altogether. "But generally," he says, "without my glasses I can only play frightened and unfortunate men."

Relaxed Controls. Despite all that, Cybulski is not a typical film star hiding a bushel of inadequacies under the half-light of tinted glass. He is a good actor and a consummate man of the theater, a stage director, a writer of screenplays, and producer of his own avant-garde theater group. While at Cracow University, he joined a student theatrical group and found his real profession when he toured the Polish provinces. "That was shortly after the war," he says. "The people who had witnessed all the horrors of the Nazi occupation felt mentally sterilized. Reciting to them the verses of our poets, I could read in people's eyes how deeply they were moved and how much longing they had for art."

In the mid '50s, state controls over the Polish film industry were relaxed, and young Polish film makers began to flourish. Cybulski's fame as an actor rose simultaneously. More than any other film, Andrzej Wajda's 1958 Ashes and Diamonds established him both in Poland and beyond. He played an underground worker ordered to kill a man whose life he saw no sense in taking; he played the role trenchantly and in the end died himself, miserably twitching, shot down in an empty lot full of rubble. "We've never seen anyone die like that," wrote one French critic. "This extraordinary actor with such an unpronounceable name! But we will never forget the face."

Vistula Sound. Cybulski now lives in Warsaw, is married to a painter whose specialty is icons, and has a four-year-old son. He goes West often. In cinema circles in Paris, he is a welcome bear of a figure. At Les Halles, he once lost his temper and tore singlehanded into a group of German legionnaires. Waitresses have been known to drop their trays at a glint from his green glasses.

Parisian moviegoers once called him "le James Dean polonnais," but producers and directors, who have learned to put up with his rise-at-noon, work-until-4 a.m. schedule, protest that he is far more--"A fine actor, a real comedian, a force of nature who never gets tired, and a true friend." As evidence of the latter they like to cite the story of a group of Polish jazz musicians--total strangers to Cybulski--who told him that if they could not find work they would have to leave France and go back to Warsaw. Cybulski walked the streets with a French friend until he finally booked the Polish combo into a place called the Tabou. For weeks after that, Cybulski carried leaflets around Paris advertising the Tabou's fabulous foursome with the Vistula sound, and proclaiming: "Jazz is not a capitalist exclusive." Nor, for that matter, are legendary film stars.

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