Their story is still remembered by many as the most controversial romance in the times of the People’s Republic of Poland. All because of their fiery romance, which happened when they were both married. Żuławski stated that through this relationship, they would become villains, he eventually left his wife for a budding actress. Braunek, on the other hand, was enchanted by him at first sight. She said it was impossible not to fall in love with him.
For Braunek, it was love at first sight
They met for the first time at the Paris-Orly airport in 1970, where Małgorzata Braunek and Andrzej Wajda were changing planes to Rio De Janeiro, where they were invited to a film festival. Andrzej Żuławski, who had been living in France for a long time, arrived there to bring a book to the eminent director. The young actress was smitten to meet this rising movie star.
He was a beautiful, charismatic man. He couldn’t help but impress. He came from Paris in a Porsche, he was surrounded by an atmosphere of mystery, he was beautiful. It was impossible not to fall in love, Małgorzata Braunek said years later.
Their next meeting took place shortly thereafter. The man organized a party for artists in his apartment, to which he also invited the actress. They were so engrossed in their conversation that they spent the entire evening together. Żuławski offered her the double role of Marta-Helena in his directorial debut, The Third Part of the Night. In the film, he presented the story of a man who suffered severely from the Nazi occupation, and after the war he met a young woman who is incredibly similar to his murdered wife.
They both got carried away with their feelings as soon as work on the production set began. Importantly, they did not try to hide it and flaunted their feelings in front of their colleagues. After a few weeks, it turned out that Braunek was pregnant. When the woman decided to tell him about it during a walk in the park, she heard blunt words from him: “We are both terrible people because you have a husband who is a good man and I am in a couple with someone who loves me. we’ll leave and be a couple of villains.”
However, that didn’t stop them from severing contact with each other. On the contrary. Very quickly, they abandoned their spouses and decided to have a quiet wedding. However, their happiness together did not last long. When Żuławski started working on the controversial film “The Devil”, he wanted to involve his beloved again. However, she was in advanced pregnancy and did not want to play at that time. Their son Xawery was born in December 1971, and the actress had to appear on the set of her husband’s film early next year, which she described as torture:
Shooting for it took almost half a year. And even though I was only commuting to my stages, I was sick with exhaustion. I felt that we were working for something bad in this film, we were touching a sphere that we shouldn’t be dealing with. It was a great darkness. And I just gave birth to my first child – recalled the actress.
This time in their relationship eventually saw the marriage fall apart soon after. Żuławski decided to move permanently to France again. And Małgorzata Braunek did not want their several-year-old son Xawery to grow up in an unpleasant atmosphere. She also did not care about leaving her homeland, because she could not complain about further proposals. In 1975, she definitely left Żuławski, and a year later they divorced. Then they also stopped having any relationship.
They came to a consensus moments before he died
Żuławski devoted himself to work in France, and then returned to Poland, where he wanted to make a film “On the Silver Globe” based on Jerzy Żuławski’s “Moon Trilogy”. However, the communist authorities prevented him from implementing the project. On the other hand, Braunek, after playing in the series “Lalka” in 1978, left the world of film and reappeared in it only in 2004, when she played in the production of “Tulipany”.
In the meantime, she became involved with another man and married the journalist Andrzej Krajewski, with whom she had a daughter, Orina. The couple lived together for 40 years. She did not keep in touch with her ex-husband, but he constantly stuck her pin in various interviews. He spared no words of criticism towards her acting or professional decisions. He described their breakup as “very deep, ideological” because he was an atheist and Braunek practiced Buddhism, which he said in an interview for the magazine “Viva!” he called religious mania.
In the same interview, he also confessed that he thought Małgorzata Braunek was the most loved of all his life partners. The actress did not respond to journalists’ questions about her ex-husband all these years and only smiled. However, before her death in 2014, they managed to sink the hatchet. The director died almost two years later in Warsaw.
Source: Gazeta
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
