Maria Dębska, the Polish star who had to vanish behind a prison wall to be seen

Maria Dębska

Photo: Telemagazyn / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 22, 1991 Warsaw, Poland
Occupation	Actress
Awards	Gdynia Film Festival

For the first half hour of Przez ścianę, the camera never leaves Maria Dębska. It stays so close that the frame often holds only her profile or a single eye, while her character, a young prisoner in rags, knocks on a cell wall until her knuckles bleed. The person she is talking to stays invisible. For an actress whom Polish film and television have spent years casting for her looks, it is a strange kind of exposure: everything that made her bankable has been taken away, and critics at the Gdynia festival called what was left one of the finest female performances in recent Polish cinema. The jury gave the film its top prize and the acting award to someone else. What she does with that gap between how she is cast and what she has just proved is the open question of her career right now.

Music came before acting. The daughter of film director Kinga Dębska, she grew up in Warsaw and completed a first year of piano at the Academy of Music in Łódź, in the class of Professor Marek Drewnowski, before she changed course and enrolled at the Łódź Film School.

Her diploma role, the title part in Juliusz Słowacki’s Maria Stuart under director Grzegorz Wiśniewski, won the Grand Prix for outstanding stage personality and the audience award at the national festival of theatre schools in Łódź, an acting prize at the international student festival in Brno and the city of Łódź’s Golden Mask for the best debut of the 2015/2016 season. Dębska, born in Warsaw on 22 May 1991, graduated in 2017, the year she joined the company of Warsaw’s Teatr Polski, where she still works.

Her first film role came from home. In These Daughters of Mine, her mother’s 2015 comedy-drama about two sisters and their ailing parents, she played Zuzia, the daughter of Agata Kulesza’s character. That same year she appeared as Hana in Marcin Wrona’s horror film Demon. Kinga Dębska cast her again in Playing Hard, a drama about three women and alcohol, in which she starred alongside Kulesza; the cast shared an ensemble award at the Off Camera festival in Kraków, and Dębska was nominated for the Zbigniew Cybulski Award, the prize for young Polish actors.

Television paid for those years and made her a familiar face. She spent three years as Jaga in the long-running soap Barwy szczęścia, played Zosia Joachim in the period drama Wartime Girls and carried 75 episodes of the police series W rytmie serca as Weronika Nowacka. In 2019 she played Aleksandra Szczerbińska, the future second wife of the Polish statesman, in the biopic Piłsudski. Polish audiences also know her voice without always knowing it is hers: she dubs Carol Danvers in the Polish versions of Captain Marvel and Avengers: Endgame.

The breakthrough was Kalina Jędrusik, the singer and actress whose open sensuality made her one of the most talked-about women in 1960s Poland. Katarzyna Klimkiewicz’s musical biopic Autumn Girl (Bo we mnie jest seks, 2021) built itself around Dębska, and she won Best Actress at the Gdynia Film Festival and a Polish Film Award nomination for it. The role demanded a body. She later told Gazeta.pl that she had been told to put on weight and then squeezed into a corset to hold it in.

That performance also fixed an image that the next few years did little to complicate. The parts that followed were mostly mainstream: the Polsat comedy Kuchnia, the Christmas franchise entry Letters to Santa 5, the Canal+ series Powrót and Kiedy ślub?. Reviewing her at Gdynia this year, TVN24’s Justyna Kobus put it bluntly, writing that she had until now been associated, because of her looks, with glamorous leading-lady roles. Even in Maciej Kawalski’s Lalka, the lavish adaptation of Bolesław Prus’s novel that reached Polish cinemas on 30 September 2026 with Marcin Dorociński as Wokulski, one reviewer found her turn as the liberated Mrs Wąsowska slightly overplayed, while forgiving it. The easy reading is that she had become a commercial lead who happened to have trained in a serious theatre. The record suggests the commercial work is where she built the leverage to choose.

The leverage is real. In Śleboda, SkyShowtime’s first Polish original, released internationally as Deadly Ties, she plays Anka Serafin, a Kraków anthropologist who runs away to the mountains and stumbles on a body. According to Deadline, the series became the streamer’s best-performing scripted show ever in Poland, watched by more than half of its Polish subscribers. Netflix followed with Just One Look, a 2025 Polish adaptation of Harlan Coben‘s thriller, with Dębska as Greta, a woman forced to dig through her own hazy memory to uncover her husband’s secrets. On 10 September 2026 SkyShowtime launched Pionek, the continuation of Śleboda, which moves Serafin and the journalist played by Maciej Musiał to Upper Silesia.

Przez ścianę is the opposite of all that. Maciej Sobieszczański’s black-and-white film, shot by Jolanta Dylewska, tells a true story: in 1947 Wiesława Pajdak, 27, was arrested for her work in the anti-communist underground and held in Warsaw’s Rakowiecka Street prison, where she began tapping in Morse code to the man in the next cell, Jerzy Śmiechowski, played by Jakub Gierszał. They fell in love without seeing each other, married inside the prison years later and spent more than five decades together. The director brought her the project more than a year before shooting. “Working with Maciek is one of the most important encounters of my professional life,” she told Interia during the festival.

The film won the Golden Lions at the 51st Gdynia festival in September. The Best Actress award went to Jaśmina Polak for Exotic, a verdict Interia’s critics called surprising. Dębska still took the stage at the closing gala, to present the screenplay award, and used the moment for something other than herself. “Screenwriters in our country are a very close-knit professional group. I wish actors were an equally close-knit professional group,” she said, urging her colleagues to join the Polish actors’ trade union and to push ZASP, the Association of Polish Stage Artists, to fight for their labour rights.

Her private life stays mostly out of the press; she was married to the actor Marcin Bosak from 2020 to 2022.

The next test comes on the calendar. After screenings at the Warsaw Film Festival in October, Przez ścianę opens in Polish cinemas on 1 January 2027 through Kino Świat, which will show whether the audience that made Śleboda a record follows her into a black-and-white prison film, and whether the industry starts offering her the parts that Gdynia’s critics say she has already earned.

Tags: actors, actresses, Maria Dębska, Autumn Girl, Just One Look, Kinga Dębska