A jovial face, a heaped thatch of straw-coloured hair, and a unique voice with a firm, peasant’s way of accenting, though also with a frank and charming tone. His acting was truly folksy. What set him apart from other actors was that he didn’t play a peasant, he was one. He was so genuine that audiences almost believed he was a naturshchik. He once said to stage designer Andrzej Stopka, ‘You know, they always dress me up in such terrible rags, horrible clogs, tatty slippers or gumboots, but just for once I’d like to appear in proper knee-length leather boots’. Stopka stood there pondering and glancing sideways, then muttered, ‘Mr. Siemion, even in knee-length leather boots, you’ll still be barefoot to me’. Whatever he wore, he was always a Polish peasant. This was exactly the character that his Corporal Naróg was in Jerzy Passendorfer’s Skąpani w Ogniu / Bathed in Fire (1963). He complained that he never got to play a higher-ranking soldier. Even so, the characters he played are embedded in the memories of generations of Polish audiences.
He debuted on the silver screen in 1951, as a naval school student in Jan Fethke’s Załoga / The Crew. Two years later he played Bronek, member of a folk song and dance ensemble, in Leonard Buczkowski’s Przygoda na Mariensztacie / Adventure at Mariensztat.
He got his big break on the big screen from Andrzej Munk. In the second half of the 1950s, he appeared in two films by Munk, Błękitny Krzyż / The Blue Cross (1955) and Eroica (1957). In Zezowate Szczęście / Bad Luck (1960) he played the loathsome personnel manager, Kacperski. In Janusz Morgenstern’s Jutro Premiera / Opening Tomorrow (1962) he was Józio the stage manager.
He was unrivalled in playing feisty intellectuals, products of social advancement with an underlying provincial sense of inferiority. He gave probably the best portrayal of such a character in post-war cinema – and one with artistic ambitions to boot – in Tadeusz Konwicki’s Salto / Jump (1964). Konwicki recalled: