[1] She was also a member of the Pacific Coast Women's Press Association and was mother of a prominent Polish-American engineer Ralph Modjeski.

[4] Józefa was born in Wróblowice, lost her father at an early age, and was taken in by the Radwański family, the owners of the nearby Swoszowice estate.

[5] There is evidence to suggest that Helena and her older brother Adolf were the results of an affair between Józefa and Prince Władysław Hieronim Sanguszko, a wealthy and influential Polish nobleman.

[12] In her early Polish acting career, Modrzejewska played at Bochnia, Nowy Sącz, Przemyśl, Rzeszów and Brzeżany.

At one of Modrzejewska's Warsaw performances, seventeen secondary-school pupils presented her with a bouquet of flowers tied with a ribbon in the red-and-white Polish national colors.

"[16] At the time of their marriage, Chłapowski was employed as the editor of a liberal nationalist newspaper, Kraj (The Country), which was owned by Adam Sapieha and a Mr.

[17] In July 1876, after spending more than a decade as the reigning diva of the Polish national theater, for reasons both personal and political, Modjeska and her husband chose to immigrate to the United States.

[18] My husband's only desire was to take me away from my surroundings and give me perfect rest from my work ... Our friends used to talk about the new country, the new life, new scenery, and the possibility of settling down somewhere in the land of freedom, away from the daily vexations to which each Pole was exposed in Russian or Prussian Poland.

Julian Sypniewski, Łucjan Paprowski, and Henryk Sienkiewicz (winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1905), were among the friends who had accompanied them to California.

Modjeska intended to abandon her career and envisioned herself living "a life of toil under the blue skies of California, among the hills, riding on horseback with a gun over my shoulder.

[20] The utopian experiment failed, the colonists went their separate ways, and Modjeska returned to the stage, reprising the Shakespearean roles that she had performed in Poland.

On 20 August 1877, Modjeska debuted at the California Theatre in San Francisco in an English version of Ernest Legouvé's Adrienne Lecouvreur.

[24] In 1880, she visited the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall and on hearing that the parish church of Ruan Minor was in need of an organ she collaborated with Mr J Forbes-Robertson to put on a performance.

A resident of Penzance and soon-to-be member of parliament for the St Ives constituency, Charles Campbell Ross, played the part of Friar Laurence.

[28] Modjeska suffered a stroke and was partially paralyzed in 1897, but recovered and soon returned to the stage, continuing to perform for several additional years.

Modrzejewska's son, Rudolf Modrzejewski (Ralph Modjeski), was a civil engineer who gained fame as a designer of bridges.

Modjeska's chief tragic roles were: Modrzejewska was also the Polish interpreter of the more prominent plays by Ernest Legouvé, Alexandre Dumas, père and fils, Émile Augier, Alfred de Musset, Octave Feuillet and Victorien Sardou.

Her favorite comedy rôles were Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, and Donna Diana in the Polish translation of an old Spanish play of that name.

Scholars Joanna and Catharina Polatynska have posited that Modjeska might have been Arthur Conan Doyle's model for the character Irene Adler, the only woman that Sherlock Holmes came close to loving.

[37] In 2009, in honor of the 100th anniversary of her death, the Historical Museum of the City of Kraków presented the exhibition "Helena Modjeska (1840–1909): For the Love of Art" (8 April – 20 September 2009).