Michał Waszyński
| Michał Waszyński | |
|---|---|
| Born |
29 September 1904 Kowel, Poland |
| Died | 20 February 1965 (aged 60) Madrid, Spain |
| Nationality | Polish |
| Occupation | Producer, Film director |
| Years active | 1922-1948 |
Michał Waszyński (29 September 1904 – 20 February 1965) was first a film director in his native Poland, then in Italy, and later (as Michael Waszynski) a producer of the major American films, mainly in Spain. Known for his elegance and impeccable manners, he was, by the people who knew him, known as "the prince".
Waszyński was born as Mosze Waks into a Polish Jewish family as Michał Waks in 1904 in Kowel, a small town in Volhynia (now in Ukraine), which at the time was part of Imperial Russia. As Germany occupied this part of Europe during World War I, he moved first to Warsaw and later to Berlin. As a young man he worked as an assistant director of the legendary German director F.W. Murnau. Upon his return to Poland he changed his name to Michał Waszyński and converted to Catholicism.
In the 1930s Waszyński became the most prolific film director in Poland, directing 37 of the 147 films made in Poland in that decade, nearly one out of four. Along with the popular films in Polish directed to a wide local audience, he directed an important film in Yiddish The Dybbuk, today a monument of the rich cultural life of East European Jewry before the Holocaust.
At the beginning of World War II Waszyński escaped from Warsaw, which was being bombed by German planes, to Białystok. That city was taken in mid-September 1939 by the Germans, but within weeks, as a result of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, the city was given to the Soviet Union and occupied by its army. Waszyński began a new career as a theater director, first in Białystok and later in Moscow.
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