Helena Modjeska
Helena Modrzejewska, known professionally in the United States as Helena Modjeska, was a Polish-American actress who specialized in Shakespearean and tragic roles. She was also a philanthropist and a socialite.
She was successful first on the Polish stage. After emigrating to the United States, she also succeeded on stage in America and London. She is regarded as the greatest actress in the history of theatre in Poland. She was also a member of the Pacific Coast Women's Press Association and was mother of a prominent Polish-American engineer Ralph Modjeski.
Helena Modjeska performed dramatic roles in five languages—Polish, English, French, German, and Czech. Her ability to work professionally in all five made her the most linguistically versatile actress of the 19th century.
According to Beth Holmgren in Starring Madame Modjeska, despite not learning English until age thirty-six and retaining a Polish accent, Helena Modjeska was regarded by stage historians as the most distinguished Shakespearean actress in America in the late nineteenth century, performing thirty-five English roles between 1877 and 1907, for a period of thirty years, appearing with leading actors such as Edwin Booth and the Barrymores, and ultimately playing 256 roles across her career.
Modjeska became a well known socialite in America, from Boston to the South, she cultivated friendships with retired presidents Ulysses S. Grant and Grover Cleveland, General William T. Sherman, poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, writer Mark Twain.
Early life
Helena Modjeska was born in the Free City of Kraków on 12 October 1840. Her birth name was recorded as Jadwiga Benda, but she was later baptized Helena Opid.The question of Modjeska’s paternity and identity has been a subject of controversy and myths from the very beginning, often perpetuated by Modjeska herself. Helena’s great-grandfather, Antoni Goltz, was a German mining engineer brought to Poland by King Stanisław August Poniatowski in the late 18th century to serve as Royal Overseer of the king’s coal mine in Szczakowa, by royal lifetime appointment. However, after the fall of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795 and the king’s abdication and departure to St. Petersburg, the monarch defaulted on Goltz’s annual royal salary, leaving him unpaid and in financial distress. This is attested in a letter from Giovanni Filippo Carosi, an Italian-born royal geologist and mining engineer who oversaw all of the king’s mining projects and appealed to the monarch for payment of Goltz’s outstanding wages. Following the collapse of the Commonwealth, Goltz was compelled to accept a lesser position as an engineer at the Wieliczka Salt Mine. He was married to Katarzyna Dunkain, who was Hungarian. One of their children was Modjeska's grandmother, Katarzyna Goltz who first married Karol Misel, a German mining engineer in Szczakowa. Their only daughter, Józefa, was born in Wróblowice. After Karol Misel died in an accident at the Wieliczka Salt Mine while trying to rescue trapped workers, Katarzyna Goltz remarried Franciszek Brückner, a government official from a German ennobled family. Katarzyna Goltz-Brückner left little Józefa to be raised by her own mother, Katarzyna Dunkain-Goltz, and her younger sister, Teresa Goltz. After her grandmother’s death — reportedly struck by lightning while sitting indoors, as attested on her death certificate — seven-year-old Józefa was taken in by the Radwański family, the owners of the nearby Swoszowice spa estate and friends of the family. They provided her with a proper education, brought her to Kraków, and arranged her marriage to Szymon Benda in 1824, a wealthy and ennobled Kraków merchant devoted to public service and civic generosity. The marriage was held at St. Szczepan Church in Kraków on 13 August 1824. The marriage certificate was signed by Józefa’s estranged mother, Katarzyna Goltz-Bruckner, and her stepfather, Franciszek Brückner.
Szymon Benda and Józefa had three sons: Józef Szymon, Jan Szymon, and. Benda died in 1835 at the age of 63, leaving his wife and sons a substantial estate, including two interconnected town houses at the corner of Grodzka and Szeroka Streets. A few years after his death, Józefa became involved with a municipial clerk, Michał Opid, an admirer of music and classical literature, who was married to Anna Krzyczkiewicz. From this marriage, he had a son Adolf. From the relationship between Józefa Benda Misel and Michał Opid, Helena was born in 1838, followed by her younger sister, Józefa Michalina, in 1842. Adolf Opid was two years older than Helena and the closest to her among all the siblings.
For a long time, a popular rumor suggested that Modjeska's father was Prince Władysław Hieronim Sanguszko, a wealthy landowner and hero of the November Uprising. The basis of this speculation was likely the resemblance in appearance and life paths between Modjeska and Sanguszko’s acknowledged daughter, also, who was also an actress, renowned for both her beauty and scandalous lifestyle.
Michał Opid died around 1845, when Helena was 5 years old. The two historic townhouses in which she and her family lived burned down in the Great Fire of Kraków of 18 July 1850, which could not be rebuilt, causing a financial ruin for Helena’s mother. One remaining property she owned in central Kraków, which had not been destroyed, she converted into a café that soon attracted local intellectuals and society ladies, because it offered a separate coat and powder-room section for them. The family moved into the flat of Doctor Schanzer, father of the actress Marie von Bülow, and Helena and her sister Józefina were sent to the school of the Presentation Sisters. In 1850 or 1851, the sisters began to take private German lessons from Gustaw Zimajer, an actor, who fostered in Helena the interest in theatre that had been awakened by her brothers, especially Feliks.
Also glossed over in Modjeska's autobiography were the details concerning her first marriage, to her former guardian, Gustaw Zimajer. Gustaw was an actor and the director of a second-rate provincial theater troupe. The date of Modjeska's marriage to Gustaw is uncertain. She discovered many years later that they had not been legally married, because he was still married to his first wife when they wed. Together the couple had two children, a son Rudolf, and a daughter Marylka, who died in infancy.
Gustaw Zimajer used the stage name "Gustaw Modrzejewski." Modjeska adopted the feminine declension of the surname when she made her stage debut in 1861 as Helena Modrzejewska. Later, when acting abroad, she simplified her name to "Modjeska", which was easier for English-speaking audiences to pronounce.
Image:Helena Modrzejewska jako Adam Kazanowski 1867 .jpg|thumb|Modrzejewska as Adam Kazanowski in The Court of Prince Władysław, 1867
In her early Polish acting career, Modrzejewska played at Bochnia, Nowy Sącz, Przemyśl, Rzeszów and Brzeżany. In 1862 she appeared for the first time in Lwów, playing in her first Romantic drama, as "Skierka" in Juliusz Słowacki's Balladyna. From 1863 she appeared at Stanisławów and Czerniowce, in plays by Słowacki.
In 1865 Zimajer tried to get her a contract with Viennese theaters, but the plan came to naught due to her rather strong accent in the of the German language. Later that year Helena left Zimajer, taking their son Rudolf, and returning to Kraków. Once there she accepted a four-year theatrical engagement. In 1868 she began appearing in Warsaw; during her eight years there, she consolidated her status as a theater star. Her half-brothers Józef and Feliks Benda were also well-regarded actors in Poland.
One incident illustrates the restrictions of nineteenth century Polish society. At one of Modrzejewska's Warsaw performances, seventeen secondary-school pupils presented her with a bouquet of flowers tied with a ribbon in the red-and-white Polish national colors. The pupils were accused by the occupying Russian Imperial authorities of conducting a patriotic demonstration. They were expelled from their school and banned from admission to any other school. One of the pupils, Ignacy Neufeld, subsequently shot himself; Modrzejewska attended his funeral.
Chłapowski
On September 12, 1868, Modjeska married a Polish nobleman, Karol Bożenta Chłapowski. His family belonged to the old Polish nobility. In the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, all nobles, irrespective of wealth, were legally equal and held the same rights. Therefore, Polish kings did not grant aristocratic titles.During the partition of Poland, aristocratic titles were occasionally bestowed by foreign rulers. For instance, Karol’s great-grandfather Count Felix Łubieński received the title of a count from Prussian King Frederick William III, but later sided with Napoleon and served as the last Minister of Justice of the Duchy of Warsaw — the final bastion of Polish independence during the Napoleonic era — where he implemented the Napoleonic Code. In addition, Karol's paternal uncle, the famed general Dezydery Chłapowski, was granted the title of Baron of the French Empire by Napoleon for his victories during the Napoleonic Wars. He later fought against the Russian occupation of Poland during the November Uprising of 1830, for which he was sentenced to prison by the Prussians. General Dezydery Chłapowski’s sister-in-law, Joanna Grudzińska—the daughter of a very wealthy Polish nobleman who owned the city of Chodzież —was granted the title of Princess of Łowicz after her marriage to Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich of Russia, the brother of both Tsar Alexander I and Tsar Nicholas I. Karol's first cousin was Dr Francis Chlapowski married to Countess Marie Lubienska. His other first cousin, Jozef Chlapowski was married to Princess Leonie Woroniecka. The Chłapowski family was considered an aristocratic family in Poland. Best known in America as "Count Bozenta," he was not a count, but the only way for Karol Chłapowski to emphasize his social status to Americans unfamiliar with Polish history was to present himself as Count Bozenta. Karol Chłapowski, like his paternal uncle, was a Polish patriot, who took part in the patriotic January Uprising against the Russian occupation of 1864 and spent one year in Moabit the Prussian prison in Berlin.At the time of his marriage to Helena Modjeska, Chłapowski was employed as the editor of a liberal nationalist newspaper, Kraj, which was owned by Prince Adam Stanisław Sapieha and a Mr. Szymon Sammelson who was Jewish.. Modjeska wrote that their home "became the center of the artistic and literary world ." Poets, authors, politicians, artists, composers and other actors frequented Modjeska's salon. Karol Chlapowski was Modjeska's devoted husband for more than forty years, until her death in 1909. Drama critic William Winter described him as "one of the kindest, most intellectual, and most drolly eccentric men it has been my fortune to know." He traveled everywhere with Modjeska as her personal manager, on long exhausting nine-month theater tours by luxury private railroad car called the Sunbeam, which they purchased for ten thousand dollars, exorbitant amount in the 1880s.