Roman Polanski: Facts, Biography, and Resources

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Roman Polanski (birth name Rojmund Roman Liebling), the well known director, was born on August 18, 1933 in Paris to Polish parents. In 1937, Polanski moved with his family back to Poland, shortly before the outbreak of World War II. He survived the Holocaust without his parents, who were forcibly taken to concentration camps for being Jewish. His mother, who was half Jewish and raised a Roman Catholic, was murdered in Auschwitz, but Roman and his father survived.

Polanski managed to escape the Krakow ghetto and learned how to survive, wandering through the Polish countryside and living with various Catholic families.

At that time in Poland, people tended to ignore the movies because they were mostly German. However, Polanski frequently went to the movies. In 1945, he was reunited with his father, who sent him to a technical school. But Polanki wanted to become a film director.

He decided to study film at the Lodz Film School, where he picked up a penchant for black humor and bizarre human relationships. In 1962, he made his first feature film, Knife in the Water, which was the first Polish post-war film not associated with a war theme. It was nominated for a United States Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.

Although already a major Polish filmmaker, Polanski left the country to move to France. Living frugally in Paris, he befriended a young scriptwriter, Gérard Brach, who became his long-time collaborator. The next two films, Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-sac (1966), made in England and co-written by Brach, won Silver and Golden Bear awards at the Berlin Film Festivals.

Polanki was married three times. His first marriage in 1959 to Barbara Lass ended in divorce in 1962. In 1967, he met and married his second wife, Sharon Tate. Their life was full of parties, travels, and influential people. On August 9, 1969 while Polanski was out of town on business, his pregnant wife was brutally murdered at their Benedict Canyon home above Los Angeles by members of the Manson Family.

Polanski made two films in North America, the Oscar winning horror film Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Chinatown (1974), which was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, and was a critical box-office success.

His talent as a director was taken seriously, and it seemed to be a promising Hollywood career. However, in March 1977, the film director was arrested and charged with a number of offenses, including the rape of Samantha Geimer, a 13-year old girl, during an alleged photo session at the home of Jack Nicholson in Los Angeles.

To escape incarceration, Polanski fled from America to Europe. He has not been back to the United States since 1978. The judge on his case swore to have him behind bars, and even though the judge died in 1989, Polanski still could not enter the U.S. without being arrested.

In this last year or so, he was held under house arrest in his chalet in Switzerland while attempting to avoid extradition to the U.S. and stand trial for the same “crime.” There were some legal maneuverings, and he was finally freed by the Swiss government. (In addition, the girl he “raped” forgave him and wanted him exonerated.)

When he made the movie Tess in 1979, he dedicated the film to the memory of his late wife, Sharon Tate. The film received three Oscars, and was nominated for Best Picture.

In 1989, he married his present wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, with whom he has two children.

He made several other films in Europe, and when he was 68-years old in 2003, Polanski received his first Best Director Oscar for the movie The Pianist, which was made in 2002. Five months after the awards ceremony, his friend and actor, Harrison Ford, flew to France to give Polanski the award.

Polanski’s most recent film release is The Ghost Writer (2010), a fictionalized thriller loosely based on the life of former British Prime Minister, Tony Blair. It swept the European Film Awards in 2010, winning six awards, including best movie, director, actor, and screenplay.

As Polanski is known to say, “The best films are because of nobody but the director.”

Resource by L.Brown

Leslie Brown is a writer and editor with over 20 years of experience in book publishing, information technology, and web content. She has edited books of fiction and non-fiction and is currently providing web content for two web sites. Leslie has a B.A. in Creative Writing, and she has also done some graduate work in technical documentation. She lives near Seattle, Washington, across from a lake, where she often plays in the water with her rescued golden retriever.

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