'It helped to think about Amy Winehouse': Cold War star Joanna Kulig

In her third film for Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski, who calls her his muse, her role as a lovelorn singer has sparked talk of an Oscar

Joanna Kulig won the glitzy Polish TV talent contest Chance for Success at the age of 15 and hasn’t really stopped singing since. Now 36, each of the three films she has made with the great Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski has required her to burst into song. In the existential mystery The Woman in the Fifth, Ethan Hawke is able to resist her until the moment she starts warbling; in the Oscar-winning Ida, she has a dynamic cameo as a nightclub chanteuse. And now, in the exceptional Cold War, Pawlikowski has finally given her a leading role: she plays Zula, who joins a touring company performing folk songs in postwar Poland. Politics inevitably intrudes – the musicians are pressured to include compositions praising Stalin to the skies – but so, too, does love. Zula and the show’s conductor, Wiktor (Tomasz Kot), begin an affair that spans 15 years and zigzags back and forth across Europe and the eastern bloc.

Related: Cold War review – wounded love and state-sponsored fear in 1940s Poland

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