You know him from The Ranch. He fought for a long time with his father to become an actor. He miraculously avoided death in the mine

Many remember him from the role of the Provost in the film adaptation of “Peasants” directed by Jan Rybkowski. It turns out that in her private life, one of Pieczka’s professions was also associated with the church. Before the war, he was employed as an organist in one of the local churches and took care of the setting of the mass. His father, who was a churchman there, got him a job. However, this is not the most astonishing profession that, at his instigation, the actor did.

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An obstacle course

Franciszek Pieczka’s road to a career was bumpy, but from an early age he felt that his place was on film sets. In the actor’s biography by Dariusz Domański you can read that even the lack of a cinema in his hometown was not an obstacle for him to make his first contact with this form of culture. Pieczka would go for several-kilometre walks to the nearby Wodzisław Śląski, and just before the outbreak of the war – to Zawada, which was annexed to Polish territory, to watch movies. He did not give up his dreams, but before he decided to go to acting school, he was persuaded by his father to work in a mine.

My father recommended this job to me: ‘Look, son, your head is not dripping, you are not panting, under the roof, you are deep’. I said to him: ‘You know, dad, I wouldn’t want it to be like the saying: the father is a musician and the son is a trumpet’. But my father tried. His friend got me a job at the Barbara-Wyzwolenie mine in Chorzów. I was going down, but I wasn’t digging coal, I was just digging holes in the stone. We drilled, shot, and when the rubble fell, we loaded the hearts onto carts. Hard physical work.

– recalled this period Pieczka, as quoted in “Co za week”. The nightmare was interrupted by an accident that could have ended tragically. It was he who became an excuse to look for another job.

I was finally convinced that I was unsuited for mining on the day when a hewer pulled me out from under a collapsing wall at the last moment. We were paid by the meter of the ditch, so there was no time to think. At one point I slipped and fell on a steel plate, on which a shot stone was flying. Had the foreman not noticed me, I would have died instantly.

– confessed the actor years later. However, the father still wanted to influence the shape of his son’s career. Since he was not suitable for physical work, he decided to send him to a university – initially, however, it was not PWST, but the Silesian University of Technology.

How a sharp mind became an actor

Not only Pieczka felt that his place was on the stage of the theater, not in the underground of the mine or in the hall of the university of technology. That was what his polonist’s heart was telling him. This anecdote was told by the actor known from “Ranch” in “Dziennik Zachodni”.

I told my Polish teacher that I would be applying to the technical university, and he said: “You’re doing something stupid, you should go to a theater school.” But my father didn’t even want to hear about it. So I passed the exam at the Silesian University of Technology, studied electronics for a month and decided that the Polish philologist was right. I went crazy, left my friends an index, said: ‘Mocie, a souvenir from me, I’m going to the theater’. Everyone was tapping their foreheads.

he said. Aware of his son’s fascination, Pieczka’s father actually did everything to discourage him from choosing an artistic profession, although he himself was active in amateur theater in his youth. Franciszek was his youngest son out of six children and it was his responsibility to provide for the whole family. No one expected that following his heart he would make a career that would provide him with financial independence. Even when, after passing his exams at the PWST in Warsaw, Pieczka returned home to tell his family the good news, he was cursed.

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My father started throwing feathers and told me that I would be a ‘Hungerkünstler’ – a starving artist.

he recalled. However, that did not happen. Shortly after defending his diploma, he received a job at the Lower Silesian Theater in Zielona Góra. For several decades of his career, he played in several dozen significant film productions, including “The Manuscript Found in Saragossa” by Has or “Hydrozagadka” by Kondratiuk. The most famous, however, are the characters he created as a serial actor – the immortal Gustlik from the series “Czterej armored men and a dog” or Stanisław Japycz from “Rancza”. Franciszek Pieczka died in 2022.