Alicja Bachleda on AllMovie

A household name and a cover girl in her native Poland, the dazzlingly talented and uniquely beautiful chanteuse-cum-actress Alicja Bachleda-Curus sported an arresting sun-drenched European look, a winning voice, and the dramatic chops to carry her as far as she wanted to go. She debuted as a singer before the age of seven and netted a host of music awards at Polish youth festivals through her 15th year. In the mean time, Bachleda-Curus took her cinematic bow as an ingenue, with a lead role at age 12 in Mikolaj Grabowski's feature The Phantom-Man-Animal. Within a half-decade of that premiere, she landed a role for the legendary Andrzej Wajda, in his 1999 Pan Tadeusz. Bachleda-Curus signed for her first major crossover part under the aegis of director Marco Kreuzpaintner, as one of the leads in the finely felt, gender-bending teen drama Summer Storm (2004), and landed another lead in the coming-of-age saga Stealth (2007), another international crossover success that told of two siblings who investigate their Polish ancestry. That same year, Kreuzpaintner and Bachleda-Curus re-teamed for the hotly anticipated thriller Trade, starring Kevin Kline; the actress plays Veronica, a young Polish woman tricked against her will into underground sex slavery.