Anna-Maria Sieklucka, the 365 Days star who stopped being ashamed of Laura

Anna-Maria Sieklucka

Photo: Magdalena Pieczonka / CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 31, 1992 Lublin, Poland
Occupation	Actress
Known for	365 Days, The Next 365 Days, 365 Days: This Day

For a stretch of one strange summer, Anna-Maria Sieklucka was the most-watched actress on Netflix and the one critics most enjoyed dismissing. 365 Days, the Polish erotic drama in which she plays Laura Biel, a Warsaw sales executive abducted by a Sicilian mafia heir played by Michele Morrone, sat at the top of the platform’s charts around the world while scoring zero on Rotten Tomatoes. She stayed with the role through two sequels. Then she turned back to the Polish stage, to a long-running Polsat serial and to a late-night radio microphone, and she has since said something few actors tied to a punchline admit out loud: she used to be ashamed of the film, and she no longer is.

She grew up in Lublin, the largest city in eastern Poland, the youngest child of Jerzy Antoni Sieklucki, a lawyer, and Joanna Sieklucka, a Germanist. She has two older brothers and speaks English, French and German alongside Polish, which mattered once the international press came calling.

Her training was unusual for a future screen lead. Sieklucka, who was born in Lublin on May 31, 1992, studied at the Puppetry Faculty in Wrocław, part of the AST National Academy of Theatre Arts, and graduated in 2018 from a school that teaches actors to make an object carry feeling with the smallest possible means.

Her first screen credit was a single episode of TVP’s hospital drama Na dobre i na złe, in which she played a patient named Aniela Grabek. Around the same time she was cast as the lead of the adaptation of Blanka Lipińska’s bestselling novel 365 dni, directed by Barbara Białowąs and Tomasz Mandes. She has said she hesitated after reading the script. The part demanded long nude and sex scenes opposite Morrone, and it asked an unknown actress to carry a story whose premise, a woman held captive and given a year to fall in love with her captor, was already contentious on the page.

The film opened in Polish cinemas in February 2020 and drew the largest cinema audience in the country that year. Its second life began on Netflix in June. It spent ten days at number one in the platform’s global ranking, and Newsweek reported it as the most-watched film on Netflix worldwide in 2020. An actress with one television episode to her name became recognisable in dozens of countries within weeks.

The reception ran the other way. Critics accused the film of romanticising kidnapping and Stockholm syndrome. The Welsh singer Duffy, who had disclosed months earlier that she had been kidnapped and raped, wrote an open letter to Netflix’s Reed Hastings saying it glamorised sexual violence, and petitions demanding its removal gathered tens of thousands of signatures. At the Razzies the film won worst screenplay and Sieklucka was nominated for worst actress. Most of that anger was aimed at the material, yet the person who absorbed it in public was its lead, and the Polish press did not spare her either. At the time of the cinema premiere, an interviewer for Viva asked whether she had worn lace lingerie to the casting and whether she liked sex. The magazine apologised and ended its collaboration with the journalist. Sieklucka explained that she had not walked out because she had been taught respect for other people, and added that women stand in a worse position in men’s eyes.

She returned as Laura, now Laura Torricelli, in 365 Days: This Day and The Next 365 Days, which Netflix released four months apart in 2022. Both again scored zero with the critics counted on Rotten Tomatoes. Both again found an audience. The trilogy fixed a version of her in international memory that has very little to do with the rest of her work.

The rest of the work is mostly Polish, and it reads like a deliberate rebalancing. She sang and impersonated on the 14th season of Polsat’s Twoja twarz brzmi znajomo in 2021, and in the autumn of 2024 she partnered Michał Kassin on Taniec z gwiazdami, the Polish Dancing with the Stars, until they were voted out in the sixth episode. In Lublin she worked at the Scena InVitro with the director Łukasz Witt-Michałowski, her former partner, appearing in Hańba and Pod lodem, two productions drawn from the Ten Commandments and from Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Dekalog.

Her one international film since the trilogy goes somewhere darker. In Neil Marshall’s Compulsion, a giallo-flavoured thriller shot in Malta, she plays Evie, a young woman with a troubled past who is pulled by a neighbour, played by Charlotte Kirk, into a run of murders on the island. It premiered at the Hot Springs International Horror Film Festival in October 2024 and reached American audiences through Saban Films in September 2025. Reviews were mixed, though at least one critic praised the natural chemistry between Kirk and Sieklucka, a kinder sentence than any the trilogy received.

At home the work has become steady. Since April 2025 she has played Eliza Olszewska in Pierwsza miłość, Polsat’s long-running daily serial: the wealthy, controlled wife of a domineering businessman, whose daughter is a patient at the series’ clinic and whose romance with Dr Jakub Wenerski has taken the storyline as far as Sicily, of all places. In September 2025 she opened as Amy in Pół żartem…, Olaf Lubaszenko’s staging of a comedy by the British playwright Peter Quilter at Warsaw’s Teatr Capitol, and the same month released the single Sercem with the singer Karolina Leszko. She also hosts PS. I love you, a late-night RMF FM podcast in which she talks with women about their lives.

It was on a podcast in June 2026 that she addressed 365 Days head-on. Eight years after the casting, she said, she no longer feels the embarrassment, the Polish word she used was obciach, that she admits carrying from 2019 to 2022, a period she ties to low self-worth and public mockery. She called Lipińska a beautifully complex woman and doubted the author would open up on her show. Nothing in her choices suggests a plan to erase Laura. What they suggest is an actress building enough Polish work around the role that it stops being the whole story, and the next pieces of that are already in motion: Eliza’s storyline in Pierwsza miłość and the Thursday-night microphone at RMF FM.

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Tags: actors, actresses, Michele Morrone, Anna-Maria Sieklucka, Neil Marshall, 365 Days

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