Maciej Słomczyński

Born in Warsaw, he was the son of Merian C. Cooper, an American aviator, American Air Force and Polish Air Force officer, adventurer, and the screenwriter, director and producer of the film King Kong.

For a few months in 1953, he worked for Służba Bezpieczeństwa (State Security), and he fled to Gdańsk to break away from the agency.

[citation needed] His translations of Shakespeare were, however, criticized for lack of clarity, faithfulness to the original or any literary value.

Słomczyński was the author of crime fiction published under the pen names Joe Alex (or Józef Aleks) and Kazimierz Kwaśniewski.

[5] Alex's crime fiction was translated into 13 languages: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, Lithuanian, Latvian, German, Russian, Romanian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovak, Slovene, Ukrainian and Hungarian.