Paweł Tucholski, Poland’s Voice of Simba and Aladdin, Dies at 57. A Theatre Had Welcomed Him to Its Company Three Days Earlier

Paweł Tucholski, the actor whose voice gave Poland its grown-up Simba in The Lion King and its Aladdin in three Disney productions, has died at 57. He died on Friday, 30 October, three days after a theatre in Gliwice announced he’d joined its permanent company. His family hasn’t made the cause of death public.

The news came first from Radio Żnin, the station in the small town in north central Poland where he was born on 6 February 1969, and spread through the Polish press on Saturday. Poland’s national film database, FilmPolski.pl, now lists his date of death as 30 October 2026.

“His death is painful news for the artistic community, but also for his home town of Żnin and the Pałuki region, where his creative path began,” the station said, as quoted by Wirtualne Media. As a teenager he performed with a local theatre group there before training as an actor in Warsaw.

Screenshot: FilmPolski.pl, 1 November 2026

The singing voice of a Disney generation

For Polish audiences who grew up in the 1990s, Tucholski was the sound of two Disney heroes. He voiced and sang the adult Simba in the Polish version of The Lion King in 1994, and he was Aladdin in the Polish dub of Aladdin, in Aladdin and the King of Thieves in 1997 and in 58 episodes of the animated series. Styl.fm notes that he sang the Aladdin songs known in Polish as “O skok” and “Wspaniały świat”, the Polish “One Jump Ahead” and “A Whole New World”.

Polish Wikipedia also credits him with singing the theme song of the first Polish dub of Darkwing Duck, listed under 1994. Super Express sums him up as a film, dubbing, theatre and musical actor, and the singing is what tied those together: in both Disney films he carried the songs as well as the dialogue.

He had the training for both. He graduated from the acting school in Warsaw, the Państwowa Wyższa Szkoła Teatralna, in 1993, and from a vocal school in Poznań. He twice won prizes at the Festival of Actors’ Song in Wrocław.

Stage, screen and a Polsat finale

Tucholski worked at Warsaw’s Teatr Kwadrat in 1993 and 1994 and at the Teatr Dramatyczny from 1994 to 2001, where he created a one-man recital called Trup i walc. On the musical stage, Super Express lists the title role in Shrek, Jekyll and Hyde in Jekyll & Hyde, Amos and Mary Sunshine in Chicago and Frollo in a Notre Dame musical. For ten years he played Caiaphas in a production of Jesus Christ Superstar, according to Styl.fm. FilmPolski.pl lists him as an actor of the Teatr im. Jaracza in Łódź in 2024 and 2025.

Television viewers knew his face from long-running series such as Klan, Złotopolscy, Kryminalni and Barwy szczęścia. In 2014 he finished fifth in the first season of Polsat’s celebrity singing show Twoja twarz brzmi znajomo, the Polish version of Your Face Sounds Familiar.

A new company, three days before

On 27 October the Teatr im. Tadeusza Różewicza in Gliwice, in southern Poland, posted a short notice: after a recruitment round, Paweł Tucholski had joined its permanent acting company. “We’re delighted, and congratulations!” wrote the theatre’s directors, Grzegorz Krawczyk and Tomasz Man, in the announcement. The portrait on that page is the photograph at the top of this article.

Several Polish outlets picked up the same detail. Super Express wrote that audiences in Gliwice won’t now see him in the theatre’s new productions. He’d been a member of the company for less than a week.

Screenshot: Teatr im. Tadeusza Różewicza w Gliwicach, 1 November 2026

“I can’t believe it”

Katarzyna Skrzynecka, who studied in the same year as Tucholski in Warsaw, was his Jasmine in the Polish Aladdin. “Tuchol… My dear Friend from the same year of studies at PWST… I can’t believe… that he’s gone from among us so young and so suddenly…” she wrote, in a post quoted by Styl.fm. She remembered them playing together in Chicago and later on the Polsat show.

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The actor Barbara Kurdej-Szatan wrote: “We’ll miss you so much…. Your extraordinary joy, talent, goodness… On stage.. and backstage.. and everywhere you shared your wonderful good energy.” RMF FM reported that the actor Jacek Kopczyński posted an archive photo with a short farewell: “Goodbye, dear Paweł….”

The musical theatre site Broadway w Polsce wrote that for many he was “a superb actor, an artist of unusual sensitivity and a unique voice, whose performances on stage, in front of the camera and at the microphone will stay with us forever.” It added: “For us, though, above all a wonderful colleague, with whom working together was a real pleasure.” Its tribute singled out his Caiaphas in Jesus Christ Superstar, “a show we wait for so much every year.”

What his work leaves behind

“He left behind roles that whole generations of viewers grew up on,” Styl.fm wrote. A dubbed film outlives the session it was recorded in, and every time a Polish family puts on the 1994 Lion King or the first Aladdin, the grown-up Simba and the street kid singing his way across Agrabah still sound like Paweł Tucholski.

Voice Over Herald sends its condolences to his family, his friends and his colleagues on stage and in the studio.

Sources: Wirtualne Media, RMF FM, Styl.fm, Super Express, Fakt and Pomponik (31 October and 1 November 2026); Teatr im. Tadeusza Różewicza w Gliwicach, announcement of 27 October 2026; FilmPolski.pl; Polish Wikipedia. Quotations from Polish sources are translated by Voice Over Herald. Image: Teatr im. Tadeusza Różewicza w Gliwicach.

Lee este artículo en español: Muere Paweł Tucholski, la voz polaca de Simba y Aladdín, a los 57 años. Tres días antes un teatro lo había recibido en su compañía

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