Do you want to know about the romantic life of prominent Dutch journalist, writer, and radio and television presenter Clairy Polak? The Dutch journalist and presenter died from a terminal illness on August 31, 2023.
Despite being terminally ill for quite some time, Polak was resilient and continued to work on the program, Human, a show that she co-presented with philosopher Ad Verbrugge, where they talked about current issues with various guests. Polak was the only child of Dutch comedians Katja Berndsen and Alexander Pola and was raised primarily in Amsterdam.
Although Polak’s father, best known for his satirical sketch comedy show ‘Farce Majeure,’ was Jewish, Polak herself didn’t grow up in the faith. However, she did talk about it from time to time. She started her television career right after high school and, after two years, became a political reporter for a radio station. In 1998, Polak was named the best radio producer of the year.
Other than being an interviewer and a presenter of current affairs, Polak acted in a play called, Terror, where she played the president of the court. Throughout her career, Polak expressed her love for the radio medium, which is more focused on the content and faster to disseminate. Polak was known for her fierce interviewing style and as the face of left-wing journalism.
However, in an interview, Polak expressed her dismay over this characterization by saying that people equate being critical of the government as left-wing and that she doesn’t want to be dismissed as a left-wing journalist. Polak was the recipient of several awards for her interviews and radio presentations. In 2010, she received the Sonja Barend Award for the best interview.
In this interview, she grilled Hans van Goor, the former CEO of DSB bank, about a defraud attempt in 2008. She was presented with the Honorary Silver Travel Microphone in 2014 for her radio career and was named the presenter of the year in 2011 by Elsevier Weekly magazine.
Now, let us talk about Clairy Polak’s love life. Journalist Clairy Polak was married to financial advisor Nico Commijs. Their marriage lasted multiple decades until 2019, when Commijs passed away from pneumonia, which was an indirect result of Alzheimer’s disease, a disease Commijs suffered from for the better part of the last decade of his life. Here is what we know about Clairy Polak’s husband and their life together.
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Meet Clairy Polak’s Partner: Everything About Her Love Life
Although for most of her career in the public eye, Clairy Polak was extremely private about her romantic and personal; she started to talk about her husband after he had passed, along with the disease from which he suffered, to generate awareness for Alzheimer’s disease.
In an interview with Pieter van der Wielen a month after her husband died, Clairy Polak talked about her upcoming autobiographical novel Beyond, Beyond, a book she didn’t intend to publish.
In the book, she wrote about what it is like to care for and deal with a loved one who has Alzheimer’s disease. This degenerative disease affects the brain’s ability to remember, along with other mental functions. To this date, the disease has no definitive cure.
She wrote about the fact that we know so little about Alzheimer’s disease and its causes. While taking care of her husband, who had Alzheimer’s for the last decade of his life, Polak noticed how the disease can often dehumanize us, as she no longer knew what her husband felt.
She said that she noticed something was wrong with her husband initially with little things, like sprinkling salt on food after he had already done that. Nico Commijs was 75 years old when he passed away in 2019 from pneumonia indirectly caused by Alzheimer’s disease. Commijs worked as a financial advisor before that.
In 2019, Polak published a novel, Past, Past, about her life with Commijs. After Commijs passed away, Polak contributed significantly to the Alzheimer Netherlands Foundation to raise awareness for the disease.
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