A Gamine Is Exiled To Gorky Park

By John Skow

When martial law closed Poland's theaters, Joanna Pacula was forced into a worldwide career

Joanna Pacula's friends among Warsaw's actors and directors know, of course, that she won't be back. There is a rueful quality to their recollections as they describe Desdemona in jeans and a sweater, a bruised angel with, as the speaker is likely to add, a will of granite.

They talk of a lean, fierce beauty with the presence and intensity to scald the screen, a very young actress with the looks and cold nerve to strip off her clothes at the end of Witold Gombrowicz's stage drama, The Operetta, as her role required, and finish the play stark naked. She was a star in Warsaw's film and television Industry, and on the stage of the city's famed Drama Theater, since her second year at the Academy of Theatrical Arts. A year and a half after she left Warsaw, almost certainly not to return, she is still a force there. Gustaw Holoubek, her first theater coach, recalls her "incredible freshness. She had no complexes. She loved a man, for instance, and she did it ostentatiously. She was not prudish." Her friend Actress Iwona Sloczynska says, "Like Brigitte Bardot, she was a little bit of an animal. She wanted to tear away from her background; I was not surprised when she left Poland."

No one could have been much surprised; Joanna Pacula's healthy ambition would have persuaded her at some point to try acting in the West. But when she did go into artistic exile, it was by a strange accident, and there was a rough irony to the circumstances that made it seem that Fate's bony finger had pointed down at her from a cumulus cloud.

By the fall of 1981 she had been acting almost without a break since 1977. At 24 she had made nine movies, had played commedia dell'arte and Polish romantic stage literature for the Drama Theater, and had just finished taking the part of Desdemona in a TV production of Othello. She was at the top of her profession in a country where theater is taken seriously.

Pacula was tired, and she felt artistically stale. She decided to take a vacation, and she flew to Paris to stay with friends. Two months later she was making plans to return when, on Dec. 13, 1981, the Polish regime declared martial law and shut down the entertainment industry. "My theater was closed," says Pacula, "so I decided to wait in Paris." She called Polish-born Director Roman Polanski, who had seen her naked in the Operetta role. He had been impressed, he said last week: "Not many young actresses are capable of doing that, but Joanna had the looks and the guts." Now he invited her to see his Paris production of Amadeus, and got her a modeling job. He advised her to learn English and give Hollywood a try. Within a few weeks, still without anything definite in mind, she wandered on to the U.S.

Last summer, while she was staying with Polish friends in Manhattan, she met Photographer Denis Piel and agreed to pose for him. Modeling? She makes a face. But she liked Piel. Piel's photos, seven full-page stunners in the February Vogue, caused an instantaneous clamor in the beauty biz. They show a tantalizing impishness, a mockery of glamour, and a drop-dead beauty that justifies the arrogance: batwing eyebrows, Slavic cheekbones, masses of brown hair, almond-shaped gray-blue eyes that expertly count the house. They are not shots of a mannequin, to be flipped past; the face, lean and mean in one pose, amused in another, is not a made-up blankness but the charged record of a formidable spirit. It is no surprise to learn that as a young lieutenant in Warsaw's student officer training corps, she was an expert in judo and fencing. (Another photo extravaganza of Pacula is about to detonate in next month's Harper's Bazaar.)

Pacula's English was improving over the New York summer, but still, she says now, "it was difficult for me to use the simplest words." Since she was charming and very pretty, and could speak fluent Russian and some Rumanian and French, her occasional flounderings with English merely added to the laughter at dinner parties. Then, in a plot turn that would not be believed in a movie script, Pacula received a phone call from an Englishman named Michael Apted.

He was a film director, he said (he had made the much praised Coal Miner's Daughter), and Roman Polanski had recommended her for a part. Could she talk? Yes, she wanted to say, in Russian, Polish, anything but English. But she agreed to meet Apted and Producer Howard Koch Jr. They planned to film the thriller Gorky Park. They wanted an East European actress to play the lead, a Siberian dissident named Irina who becomes involved in a triple murder in Moscow, and then falls in love with Arkady, the Russian cop assigned to solve the case. Could Pacula do a screen test?

Cut to Helsinki, seven months later:

The American actor William Hurt stands outside a hospital building on a cold, dull day. He is a strange, brooding fellow, who talks about acting in vast, geographical metaphors, as if he were the commencement speaker at a drama school. But he is uncannily good at his job. As he waits between takes, he is clearly American; as the camera rolls, something too subtle to catch happens to his face--a matter of clouding, of caution--and he becomes unquestionably Russian. He is Arkady, trying to shake some information from the hostile Irina, who despises all police. They argue in fierce whispers, emotion escaping in chilly puffs of condensation; she turns away, he grabs her arm, she pulls free. Now Irina--the Polish wanderer Joanna Pacula--walks arrogantly away from Arkady and the camera, a skinny, defiant waif in ponytail and jeans. At a distance of perhaps 50 feet she turns, without stopping, and throws over her shoulder one of the great movie stares of all time, lashing the confused Arkady with suspicion, anger, and an astonishing wattage of awakening sexual interest.

"Cut! Print it!" yells Director Apted, a tall fellow in Moon Boots and an Everest anorak. Casting Pacula as the lead was a wild risk, Apted admits, and not simply because of her English, which she has now brought to the level of lightly accented near fluency. The fact is that except for the screen test, nobody in the West had ever seen a frame of film she had made. Says Apted: "I loved the look of her, the demeanor, that's what I cast."

Pacula is lean and quick; there is a tough, tensile quality about her--not the invulnerability of an enchanted child, but the eerie confidence of the very strong. Polanski, in Paris, talked of her "great acting talent and her tremendous will," and then added that "as we Poles say, 'She does not pour vodka behind her collar.' " This, he explained, means not that she swills alcohol, but that she throws herself fearlessly at life.

In a sedate hotel dining room in Helsinki, she gives a writer a big, rowdy kiss, and orders not vodka but tea and a huge chunk of chocolate cake. She talks of a happy, privileged childhood in Tomaszow Lubelski, a town of some 20,000 people about 200 miles southeast of Warsaw. Her father ran a construction business until he became ill some years ago. She was a track star as a child; at eleven she had the best time in Poland in the 80-meter sprint. She began to be interested in the stage, but theater simply did not exist in her provincial town. When she took a bus to Warsaw at the age of 17, having had no training whatsoever and, amid a crowd of 400 applicants, qualified for one of 20 places at the theatrical academy, no one except her mother believed it. One of her audition pieces, she says, and here she giggles at the thought of her innocent 17-year-old self, was part of Molly Bloom's erotic soliloquy from Ulysses.

No one from Tomaszow Lubelski had ever done such a thing. "In Poland people stay in their towns; they have their houses, their televisions, their jobs," she says. "Maybe if I had fallen in love at 18, I could have lived that way, but I would not have been happy."

What now? She doesn't know. Still, "Gorky Park is a great adventure, even if nothing happens after." Maybe, says this adventurer with a laugh, she won't even be able to leave Finland for Stockholm, where the film's final scenes are to be shot. Someone stole her purse and passport in New York, her temporary papers have expired, and the Polish embassy is not likely to give her another passport. She isn't worried. "I am a tank," she says, looking very untanklike. (The Swedes did, in fact, let her enter the country.)

When the film is finished, she will go to New York to study dance, singing and American history. Really? she is asked. "Of course. I must learn about America."

And Poland? Could she go back to see her parents, her married sister and little niece, her younger brother who is studying in the sports academy, her twelve-year-old sister in music school?

Yes, certainly, she says. There would be no problem at all. But the production of Othello, in which she played Desdemona before she left, still has not been shown on Polish television. Do the authorities resent what she insists is not a defection?

She is quiet for a moment. "I know I could go back," she says. Another pause. "There might be a problem about leaving again." --By John Skow This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.