Małgorzata Braunek

Life

Małgorzata Braunek was born on 30 January 1947 in Szamotuły¹. In 1969 she graduated from the State Higher School of Drama (PWST) in Warsaw, and in 1972–1974 she appeared on the stage of the National Theatre (Teatr Narodowy)¹. According to the note in the filmpolski.pl database, she gave up acting in the 1980s and returned to it at the beginning of the twenty-first century. She was a member of the Polish Film Academy¹. She died on 23 June 2014 in Warsaw and was buried in the Evangelical-Augsburg (Lutheran) Cemetery¹.

Before The Deluge her roles included Irena in Hunting Flies (Polowanie na muchy, 1969) and Helena, Michał's wife, and Marta in The Third Part of the Night (Trzecia część nocy, 1971)¹. In 2014 she was awarded the Officer's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta and the Gold Medal for Merit to Culture – Gloria Artis¹.

In The Deluge

In Jerzy Hoffman's film Braunek played Oleńka Billewiczówna². In the description on the Polish Film Heritage List, Stefan Głowacki writes of Oleńka as the film's „głównej (w pewnym sensie jedynej) postaci kobiecej” ("principal (in a sense, only) female character"), and Braunek's performance was received „dość ozięble” ("rather coolly") at the time of the premiere³. The author of the description himself defends her acting. He asks whether it is not the actress's „ascetyczne wycofanie” ("ascetic reserve") that „najlepiej sprawdza się jako kontrapunkt dla Kmicicowskiej buńczuczności” ("works best as a counterpoint to Kmicic's swagger")³.

Oleńka: more than Kmicic's beloved

In the novel Oleńka has principles of her own and judges Kmicic by his actions: affection does not suffice when he resorts to violence and chooses the wrong allies⁴. Their screen relationship is therefore more than a romance. Her refusal to excuse him is one reason the hero must change.

Why Braunek?

Hoffman later said he cast Braunek to bring Oleńka closer to the women watching the film. He felt that a literal translation of the nineteenth-century heroine to the screen would have been difficult to accept in the 1970s⁵. Waldemar Prokopowicz, the second director who worked on set throughout the shoot, recalled that Braunek was easy to work with⁶.

In the National Film Archive exhibition, Hoffman recalled that Braunek came for screen tests while the crew was filming at Jasna Góra; she was then seven months pregnant. Battle scenes allowed the production to wait before shooting her part⁷. Braunek herself said after the premiere that she had expected criticism: readers had their own picture of Oleńka, and no candidate could have satisfied everyone. She also considered the literary heroine too idealised⁸.