Jerzy Radziwiłowicz first came to French cinema in 1981, to star as an expatriate Polish film director in Jean-Luc Godard's Passion (1982). He was thirty-one and thought of himself mainly as a stage actor, having been a regular member of the company at the Stary Theatre in Kraków, where he first encountered Andrzej Wajda. It was, of course, Wajda's film Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru), made in 1977, that brought Radziwiłowicz international fame, as well as changing his self-image as an actor, revealing, as he told Cahiers du cinéma, “a part of myself that I didn't want to know: a timid and sensitive person.”

The debate that Man of Marble elicited in the still-politicized France of the late 1970s was fervent and prolonged. It filled a large portion of three issues of Cahiers, culminating in an extensive tribute by Godard in May 1979. In this quintessentially Godardian image-essay we can discern a fascination for the young actor, which makes it unsurprising that the director soon contacted him for discussion of a project. Radziwiłowicz received the invitation with some trepidation: “I've seen some of his films; his way of thinking is so different from other things I've done”2—trepidation that proved warranted by the notoriously difficult relations between director and actors in Passion (1982). The somewhat agonizing shoot nonetheless established Radziwiłowicz as a potential resource for the more demanding sectors of French cinema, and the mutual respect that grew between him and Michel Piccoli— the doyen of the actors on the set of Passion, as well as apparently the principal line of communication between Godard and the cast—would determine his casting in Piccoli's film The Black Beach (La plage noire, 2001) some twenty years later.