For many years it was believed that she died during the Uprising. It didn't have much of a romantic legend, because shortly before her death she fell in love with a German and such women were not forgiven. Is that why she decided to fake her death?
Ina Benita - a woman who chose such an original artistic pseudonym must have had an unusual biography. The nickname itself was created in a very simple way:the future actress was baptized as Janina, and Benita was her middle name .
It was long believed that Ina Benita died during the Warsaw Uprising. Still from the film "People of the Vistula" (1938).
She was born on March 1, 1912 in Kiev as Inna Florow-Bułhak. In 1920, due to the Bolshevik offensive, she came to Warsaw with her parents. Later that same year, her mother died. She was closely associated with her father, Mikołaj Florow-Bułhak, until 1944, when he died under the rubble of the capital.
Educated, beautiful and talented
Ina Benita has a great education. First, she graduated from Sacré-Coeur, a Parisian boarding school where her father sent her. However, it did not stop there. In Warsaw, she completed a vocal and drama course with Ms Hryniewiecka with honors. So she had a workshop to make a career.
She also had the conditions for this. When you look at pictures of Ina Bienita today, you cannot escape comparing her with the Hollywood stars of the 1920s and 30s. Marlene Dietriech, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow - Ina could confidently compete with them when it comes to beauty. Beautiful face, shapely legs, deep green eyes, beautiful teeth ... She was even called the Polish Mae West!
But not only in this respect she matched them - like her friends from abroad, she was also an excellent actress. She made her debut on August 29, 1931 in the "Nowy Ananas" theater in Warsaw, in the program Paradise without men . And while many of the critics who watched the plays and movies in which she acted very often emphasized her appearance above all else, they couldn't ignore the fact that she played great. Many productions even saved with her grace and sense of the role .
Ina Benita was admired for her beauty, but her acting was also appreciated. The photo shows a rehearsal for the musical comedy "On the Aetheric Wave" by Paweł Leone at the Malicka Theater in Warsaw.
In films, she usually played the roles of fatal women, seductresses, beauties basking in luxury. She presented her comedy talent in theaters and cabarets. At her side there were the greatest celebrities, such as Mieczysław Ćwiklińska ("Doktór Murek"), Aleksander Zelwerowicz ("People of the Vistula"), Lidia Wysocka ("Gehenna"), Jadwiga Smosarska ("Two Joas") or Eugeniusz Bodo ("His Excellency subject ").
And although it may have seemed that the role of either the unfaithful wife in "My Parents Are Getting Divorced" or the temptress Irena in "Black Diamond", Ina Benita would not be liked by the fans, quite the opposite happened. Perhaps a nice, cheerful and always helpful young woman was hard to identify with a screen vamp? It should also be remembered that the actress showed her sense, intelligence and incredible sensitivity in interviews. In an interview with the press in 1937, for example, she said:
Write that I'm terribly in love. My love has a lovely-sounding name that brightens people's eyes. My love is called:life. I am "to death" in love with life .
But life wasn't her only love…
In the power of feelings
Ina Benita knew how to manage her career. She was also resourceful, especially when you had to help others. However, when it comes to her love life, it is safe to say that it was not stable. Her first husband was Jerzy Tesławski, a Russian who, like her, came to Warsaw in 1920. The couple's wedding took place in January 1931; but two years later, in 1933, the actress fell in love with Igo Sime. When they formed a relationship, he was just a rookie actor with a lover's beauty. It was only during the war that his second nature came to light.
Ina and Igo's love ended as soon as it began. The next choice of the young woman was the cinematographer Stanisław Lipiński, with whom she collaborated, inter alia, during the filming of "People of the Vistula". They were very different - the actress was sociable, open and she was full of her everywhere, and Lipiński, definitely calmer, appreciated the privacy of his home. Despite this, they lived happily for several years. Their relationship began in 1934. They even got married, but in early 1939 their marriage broke up.
Due to the turmoil of the war, the Lipiński family never got divorced. Meanwhile, the loving Benita, before she broke up completely with her husband, had already managed to allocate her feelings elsewhere. As the dancer Krystyna Marynowska said, "she sprinkled her head with someone else". This time her chosen one was a colleague from the set, actor Wojciech Ruszkowski. The union did not survive the hard test which was the beginning of the war. The man quickly left his new mistress and returned to his family in Krakow.
Read also:Igo Sym. The most handsome Polish traitor
Ina Benita's Forbidden Love
The life of the actors during the war was no easier than that of ordinary people. Some of the actresses worked in cafes, and those who had no job sold their belongings. Ina belonged to the latter group. When the theaters were reopened, it appeared on the stage of theaters ("Comedy", "Blue Butterfly", "Miniatures"). After the war, many artists were ostracized for it, but the truth is that they had to earn a living somehow, just like bakers, hairdressers and furriers who did not work in the underground.
But it was not because Ina Benita was practicing her profession under the occupation that she was almost erased from history after the war. The real cause was her affair with a German lieutenant, Otto Haver from Vienna. As Agnieszka Cubała tells in the book "Love "44. 44 true stories of insurgent love ” :
The Austrian was a photographer by profession. In the capital, he served in a propaganda company which was to connect the front with the Third Reich in word and image. He himself, above all, documented military actions. Until 1943, he was stationed in the Warsaw Wehrmacht garrison as a staff officer. They met at one of the parties organized by Józef Horwath and Hanna Libicka. In 1942 they were already a couple in love .
Benita changed the object of her feelings quite often. One of her chosen ones was the actor Wojciech Ruszkowski (right). Photo from the show "A little bit of love" (1938).
The underground occupation press clearly forbade such relationships - Polish women were not allowed to meet with the occupiers. Haver's situation was the same - any extra-marital relationships with the inhabitants of the occupied country were severely punished. Men were encouraged to visit brothels, but getting into relationships or going on dates was unacceptable. Conscious of the risks, the lovers left for Vienna, but returned to Warsaw in 1944. As he writes in the book "Love '44" Cubała:
They were arrested shortly thereafter. They were denounced to the Gestapo by Haver's jealous wife, Brigitte, a member of the NSDAP. The mere betrayal of her husband was a blow to her, and the fact that her rival turned out to be primitive, in her opinion, Polish, increased the scale of humiliation. In addition, her husband's lover was pregnant! (...) The German was degraded as a punishment and, together with the so-called punitive company, was sent to the eastern front . He probably died there. And Ina found herself in the Pawiak. More specifically, to a women's prison called Serbia .
The fate full of secrets
In the female part of Pawiak Ina Benita on April 7, 1944, she gave birth to a son, Tadeusz Michał. She almost ended up in the camp with the child. Their lives were saved by Helena Danielewiczowa, a delegate of the Patronage (an organization taking care of prisoners), who postponed the departure of mothers and children from July 30, 1944 by one day. The next day she was released, the women were among about 200 prisoners released by the Germans from prison - they were released.
It meant a momentary happiness for Benita, and then a struggle for the survival of himself and the child of several months. During the Warsaw Uprising, she had to find food herself. She was hiding with little Tadeusz in the cellars, initially in the Old Town. Later it broke through the sewers to the temporarily quieter Śródmieście. It was then that a rumor appeared that she and her child died in the underground corridors of the capital. The rumor is unsupported and - as witnesses claim - completely sucked out .
In fact, the pre-war star managed to escape abroad. Unfortunately, alone. She was convinced that her son, affectionately called "Mimi", had died under the rubble of the city. Meanwhile, the truth was different - the child, who was considered a war orphan, was looked after by Zofia Grzesik, who lived in Pruszków. One day, Tadzio's former caretaker met a woman with a boy on the street and recognized her protégé. Luckily the mother and her beloved son managed to reunite.
Contrary to circulating rumors, Ina survived the war. She managed to flee the country and began a new life in exile. Photo from the movie "People of the Vistula" (1938).
In exile, Ina Benita got married again. She married a German, Hans Goerg Pash, who recognized her child and to whom she gave birth to a baby girl, who unfortunately died only a few days later. After the death of her partner, who was murdered in 1946, she left for France. Due to the difficult financial situation, in 1949 she gave her son Tadeusz to be brought up in a convent school - probably in Sacré-Cœur, where she spent her youth. In France, she met the handsome American Lloyd Fraser Scudder. In 1951 Scudder and his unit were summoned to Morocco, which improved the actress's financial situation, so in 1952 she picked up Tadeusz from the convent school. A year later, she left with her children to a partner who then lived in Algeria, and then to the USA. He became her fourth husband and father to her second son, John.
Recently, the Internet was electrified by a photo of a joyful blonde surrounded by two sons, dated 1959. This smile is not forgotten - it was Benita, who lives on the American soil, who posed on it. There she also died in 1984 and was buried in the Middletown Cemetery. One thing is for sure. Critics who assessed the actress's game so positively, having read a script based on her biography, would probably say: "Not credible! The film only saves the main character! ” .