Young, athletic lead who established himself in Poland as the star of Jerzy Lipman's "Ashes" (1965) and went on to become a prominent supporting player of European films of the 1970s and 80s. Superb at playing both inflexible figures of authority and benign, sympathetic types, Olbrychski has appeared in films by Andrzej Wajda, Miklos Jancso, Margarethe von Trotta and Joseph Losey. His first performance in an American film was as the devious bureaucrat in Philip Kaufman's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (1988).
