A Look Back:

Helena Modjeska, one of the most influential people in Orange County history, made a name for herself as a Shakespearean actress on the American stage after emigrating from Poland.

Despite being a foreigner with an accent and an imperfect (albeit impressive) command of the English language, Modjeska won the hearts of the American public, performing the leading lady roles in Shakespeare’s tragedies. During her life she attracted the attention of the likes of playwright Oscar Wilde, who reprinted one of her poems at the beginning of his manuscripts, and novelist Willa Cather, who designed a character after the actress in one of her books.

“A most charming and attractive lady in social life she takes with her upon the stage those qualities which have made her one of the greatest delineators of Shakespeare’s female characters, her Rosalind in ‘As you like it,’ being acknowledged the best on the American stage today,” an LA Times theater writer wrote in 1889.

Although she toured around the world for most of her life, Modjeska loved the rugged California wilderness that she saw when she moved to Anaheim in 1876 after emigrating.

Her rustic yet refined house in an oak grove in Modjeska Canyon (named after her) still stands as a national historical landmark and is named Arden.

Her lesser known house on Bay Island, in Newport Beach, however, is no more. She moved into the place, dubbed “Little Arden,” one year before her death, as friends and family encouraged her to leave the wilderness for her health.

Basia Myszynski, an Orange County filmmaker, recently finished what she believes to be the only documentary film produced on Modjeska’s life on the 100th anniversary of her death, in 1909. The 57-minute film contains no footage of the actress. It goes chronologically through her life with clips of videotaped interviews of her great-great-grandchildren and several college professors as well as a collage of old still photographs and short dramatizations of events in her life.

Myszynski is herself Polish and says that Modjeska is now a bigger figure for most Polish-Americans than she is with the general public, but few people know much about her.

“I was getting really fed up with the fact that people in Orange County didn’t know who she was,” the filmmaker said.

According to the film, Modjeska was an illegitimate child, perhaps of a Polish prince, and had only four years of education.

Yet despite all of that and the language barrier she managed to excel at interpreting characters that are esoteric even to well-read intellectuals.

She brought “so much interest and feeling,” to the Shakespearean roles that she managed to portray the characters in a more convincing and poignant manner than most actors of the day, the Times theater critic wrote.

Along with the canyon that bears her name, Bay Island was informally known as Modjeska Island, Myszynski said.

The northern-most of the two peaks that make up Saddleback Mountain is also called Modjeska Peak.