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...