Roman Polanski | Biography

Like his internationally famous films, the life of director Roman Polanski involved terror and tragedy. A Holocaust survivor whose difficult childhood was lived on the run from Nazis, Polanski won wide acclaim and an Academy Award nomination for his first full-length film, Knife in the Water (1962), while he was only 29 years old. In the late 1960s he moved to Hollywood where he directed critical and financial hits, but his personal life contained loss and scandal. In 1969, his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was murdered along with several friends in a mass slaying directed by Charles Manson. A decade later, Polanski pleaded guilty to having unlawful sex with an underaged teenage girl. Before sentencing, however, he fled the United States to France, where he lived afterward.

Three years after his birth in Paris in 1933, Polanski's Polish Jewish parents moved the family back to Poland. The family settled in Cracow, the nation's third largest city. Following the German invasion of Poland, the Jewish ghetto there was gradually sealed off by the Nazis and, in the years to come, some 55,000 Jews were sent to the death camps. In 1941 Polanski watched as his parents were seized. His mother died in Auschwitz while the boy lived off the charity of Catholic Poles who hid him in the countryside. Reunited with his father after the war, Polanski began acting at the age of twelve and later entered the Lodz film school in Poland.

Following his auspicious film-making debut, Polanski's career soared. He made films in England that explored psychological terror, including Repulsion (1965), before making his American directorial debut with the satanic horror film, Rosemary's Baby (1968). That year he married the actress Sharon Tate, but in August 1969 shattering news reached Polanski where he was working in Europe: Tate, along with four others, had been found stabbed and strangled in the couple's Los Angeles home, strange messages written on the walls in blood. The murderers, who committed three other killings in a separate incident, were followers of 35-year old cult leader Charles Manson, later tried and convicted.

In 1978, Polanski made the crime thriller Chinatown, which proved to be his last film shot in the United States. A year later, he was arrested in California for allegedly drugging and raping a 13-year old girl. Held under psychiatric observation pending trial, he served 42 days in prison. Ultimately he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge to one count of unlawful sex with a inor but fled bail before sentencing.

Declared a fugitive from U.S. justice, he remained in France, directing several films as well as theater and opera productions in the intervening decades and winning numerous international awards. Occasionally, rumors surfaced that Polanski wanted to return to the United States. In 1997 newspapers reported that he had attempted to negotiate a reduced sentence with the Los Angeles attorney's office, but no deal was made.

Recent Updates

March 24, 2004: Polanski will direct a re-make of Oliver Twist from a screenplay by Ronald Harwood. Shooting begins in the Czech Republic later in the year. Source: New York Times, www.nytimes.com, March 24, 2004.

November 17, 2004: Polanski appealed a ruling by a British court that he must appear in person in order to pursue charges of libel against the magazine Vanity Fair. Because of an extradition treating between Great Britain and the U.S., Polanski could be taken into custody if he sets foot on British soil and sent back to the U.S., where he would face criminal charges springing from his legal troubles in the 1970s. Source: New York Times, www.nytimes.com, November 17, 2004.