Joanna Kanska
British actress
Joanna Kanska (born 1 April 1957) is a Polish-British actress who has worked in film, television, theatre and radio. She emigrated to the United Kingdom in 1984.
Career
Born in Nowy Sącz, she attended the National Film School in Łódź from 1976 to 1980.
Kanska's best known roles on television were as a Polish academic, Grete Gretowska, in the second series of the BBC's A Very Peculiar Practice (1988) (and a sequel, A Very Polish Practice in 1992), as Ludmilla in The New Statesman, as Finnish bank trading floor dealer Sirkka Nieminen in Capital City (1990) and as KGB Major Nina Grishina in the BBC's mini-series Sleepers (1991). Kanska starred as lawyer Magda Ostrowska in the BBC series Madson (1995–1996). She also played the part of Greta Beaumont, a Sudeten German woman, in the first episode of Foyle's War.
Personal life
Shortly after her arrival in the UK, Kanska married Polish artist Kaz Kanski after a romance of a few weeks. They divorced five years later, but she retained her married name (the feminine version of Kanski).
The public source identifies “Joanna Kanska” as british actress. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Joanna, Kanska and British.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6205866. VIAF identifies the subject as 294162751. The Library of Congress control number is no2012158673. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1957, 1984, 1976 and 1980.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joanna Kanska” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.