Magdalena Różczka, the Polish actress who won’t play the wife in the background

Magdalena Różczka

Photo: Fryta 73 / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 27, 1978 Nowa Sól, Poland
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Letters to Santa 3, Ladies
Awards	Pola Negri Film Award of the Marshal of the Kujawsko-Pomorskie Region · Dumni z Powstańców distinction

In the Toronto festival’s notes for Jan Holoubek’s Wild Wild East, the villagers of Małe Zalesie are listed one by one: Kuliś, his scrappy wife, Kaim, and then “his wife (Magdalena Różczka)”. She does not get a name of her own. It is a fair summary of how Polish screen credits have described her for years, and an unfair one of what she does with them. In Netflix‘s Heweliusz she played the captain’s widow who will not let a ferry disaster be pinned on a dead man. In HBO Max’s Niebo. Rok w piekle she played the cult leader’s partner, and refused to let anyone call that woman a victim. The parts are still wives on paper. On screen they drive the story.

The route there was not a straight one. Różczka grew up in Nowa Sól, a small industrial town on the Oder in western Poland, where she was born and where she first acted, as a teenager, in the amateur company Terminus A Quo. The theatre did not look like a career at first. She spent half a year studying computer science at the University of Zielona Góra, then two years in sociology, and paid her way as a sales assistant in a drugstore and as a court recorder at the district court in Zielona Góra, taking down other people’s testimony. Only then did she apply to the acting faculty of the Theatre Academy in Warsaw.

When she graduated in 2004 she was already working. Her first screen appearance had been a nurse in an episode of the long-running soap Klan, and for most of the 2000s she was Julita Korzeniewska in Polsat’s Samo życie. Jan Jakub Kolski gave her a small part in Pornografia, his Gombrowicz adaptation. The role that first made her a lead, though, was one with authority rather than romance: police superintendent Aldona Ginko in TVP’s crime trilogy Oficer, Oficerowie and Trzeci oficer, where by the third series she had become a prosecutor.

The decade that followed is the one most Polish viewers remember. She was Monia, the millionaire of the group, in the 2008 ensemble comedy Lejdis. She took over the role of Wanda Ryszkowska, a pre-war stage actress dragged through the Pawiak prison and forced labour, in Czas honoru, TVP2’s wartime series, staying until its final chapter about the Warsaw Uprising. TVN cast her in Usta usta, its version of the British Cold Feet, then in the hospital drama Lekarze and, later, in Tajemnica zawodowa. In the Christmas franchise Listy do M. she played Karolina Krawczyk in the third and fourth films.

There was also a second career that audiences heard without seeing. In the Polish dubs of the Marvel films she is the voice of Peggy Carter, from Captain America: The Winter Soldier to Avengers: Age of Ultron and Ant-Man, and of Captain Carter in the animated What If…? She voiced the witch Evanora in Oz the Great and Powerful and the investigator Lauren Winter in the video game Heavy Rain.

The obvious reading of her recent rise is a private one, and it is the reading she has to work against. Her partner is the director Jan Holoubek, the son of the actors Gustaw Holoubek and Magdalena Zawadzka, and several of her most visible parts of the last six years come from his sets: Katarzyna Korejwo in 25 lat niewinności, his debut about the wrongful conviction of Tomasz Komenda; Anna Jass in the second and third seasons of Rojst, the crime series he wrote with Kasper Bajon; Jolanta Ułasiewicz in Heweliusz; and now the wife of Kaim in Wild Wild East. That account leaves out the part of her work that is hardest to dismiss. Her darkest character came from another director entirely, Bartosz Blaschke, and her steadiest lead from Klara Kochańska-Bajon. It also ignores a pattern that has nothing to do with family: in project after project, the industry still books her as somebody’s wife and then lets her carry the scenes.

Heweliusz is the clearest case. Netflix’s five-part drama about the sinking of the ferry Jan Heweliusz in the Baltic in 1993, written by Kasper Bajon and directed by Holoubek, was billed as the largest Polish series production in years. Różczka plays the wife of Captain Andrzej Ułasiewicz, played by Borys Szyc, who goes down with the ship and is then blamed for it. The series follows her refusal to accept that verdict, and it sets the wives and widows of the crew against an institutional indifference that outlasts the storm.

Niebo. Rok w piekle, adapted from Sebastian Keller’s memoir of his years in a religious commune, gave her the opposite problem. Her character, Dorota, is the partner of Piotr, a self-proclaimed healer played by Tomasz Kot. “It was the first time I had been offered a character this negative,” she told the Polish site PPE.pl, adding that she had to work through the role for a long time before shooting. She was blunt about the woman’s guilt: “She is not a victim in that relationship at all. She shares the guilt for what goes on in the sect.”

The other strand of the present is The Mothers of Penguins, Kochańska-Bajon’s Netflix series about parents of neurodivergent and disabled children, in which Różczka plays Tatiana Tracz. Its second season arrived on Netflix on 21 October 2026, with Tatiana and the other parents opening a school of their own after failing to find one that would take their children. Recognition has followed the shift: in 2024 she received the Pola Negri Film Award of the Kujawsko-Pomorskie region at the Tofifest festival in Toruń, the same prize Holoubek had won the year before, and in March 2026 the Dumni z Powstańców distinction, given to people and institutions who keep the memory of the Warsaw Uprising alive.

Away from the set, UNICEF appointed her a national goodwill ambassador in Poland in 2010. Różczka, who was born on 27 July 1978, has a daughter from her marriage to the screenwriter Michał Marzec and two daughters with Holoubek.

What comes next is already filmed. Wild Wild East, a wartime thriller set in the winter of 1943, had its world premiere in the Platform section in Toronto and opened the Polish Film Festival in Gdynia in September, with Itay Tiran, Robert Więckiewicz and Joanna Kulig in the cast. Polish cinemas are still waiting for its general release. When it arrives, the credits will once again call her his wife. The question her last three projects have answered is how little that label now explains.