Karol Karlinski

Biography

A November chill in 1882 welcomed Karol Karlinski to the world in Płock, then a corner of the Russian Empire; the city, now proudly Polish, was his first stage. Within four decades he would embody doomed lovers and tormented souls on early-Polish celluloid: the escapee of *Na jasnym brzegu* (1921), the seducer of *Dzieje grzechu* (1911), the penitent *Slave of Sin* (1914). Audiences knew the flash of his dark eyes long before the lights of Warsaw’s cinemas dimmed. Summer 1929 found him in Wilno—today’s Vilnius—where, on 22 July, the final curtain fell far from the Vistula River that had cradled his first dreams.