Roman Polanski Biography

This internationally renowned filmmaker has become as notorious for his tumultuous life as for his sometimes darkly funny but deeply disquieting psychological dramas, jet black comedies and tough-minded period films. After a childhood stained with Nazi atrocities, Polanski began his film career first as a juvenile actor and later as a neophyte director in Poland. He went on to establish his reputation with several films shot in England before finding his artistic and commercial apotheosis in Hollywood.
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The European expatriate also found Southern California to be a place of shocking violence and profound personal tragedy. Polanski fled the US to escape the consequences of a sex scandal. He continued to make films in exile albeit with less frequency and smaller budgets. Though still controversial, Polanski continues to be numbered among the world's great directors.

Roman Polanski was born in Paris of Polish-Jewish parents. At the age of three, he and his family returned to Krakow in his father's native Poland. As a seven-year-old, Polanski witnessed the Nazis sealing the Krakow ghetto where his family lived. The youngster soon became an active participant in smuggling runs in and out of the ghetto. While on these missions, Polanski would sneak into outlying movie theaters. The following year, his parents were taken to a Nazi concentration camp, where his pregnant mother was gassed shortly after arrival. Polanski only narrowly avoided capture when his father pushed him through a gap in a wall as the Nazis approached. Some of these horrifying events would later be recreated by Steven Spielberg in "Schindler's List" (1993). During the long genesis of that film's screenplay, Spielberg reportedly approached Polanski on several occasions about directing the film. However, with several friends and relatives among the Krakow Jews whom Schindler saved from the camps, Polanski found the material too personal and painful.

Growing up in war-torn Poland, the young Polanski found solace in trips to the cinema and in acting in radio dramas, on stage and in films. His early screen acting credits included work with famed Polish director Andrzej Wajda. In 1954, he was accepted to an intensive five-year program at the Lodz Film School. One of his student films, "Two Men and a Wardrobe" (1958), won five international awards, including a Bronze Medal at the Brussels World's Fair. In 1962, Polanski directed his first feature-length film, "Knife in the Water". Poorly received by Polish state officials and some domestic critics, the film was a sensation in the West, was awarded the Critics' Prize at the Venice Film Festival and won an Academy Award nomination as Best Foreign Film.

Polanski moved to England to make his next three films: "Repulsion" (1965), a psychological horror story of a young woman's mental disintegration; "Cul-de-Sac" (1966), a dark comedy of mobsters and a mismatched couple set in an isolated castle; and a Hammer horror parody, "Dance of the Vampires/The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me But Your Teeth Are in My Neck" (1967), in which Polanski co-starred with American actress Sharon Tate. He and Tate married in 1968, the year that also marked Polanski's American film debut with "Rosemary's Baby", an enormously successful adaptation of Ira Levin's tale of gynecological horror. The following summer, Polanski's new-found success was dealt a shattering blow when the eight-months pregnant Tate and three of Polanski's friends were murdered by members of the Charles Manson cult. His next film, "Macbeth" (1971), was a brutally realistic adaptation of the violent Shakespeare tragedy that was interpreted by some critics as the filmmaker's cathartic response to the Manson slayings. Polanski himself, however, downplayed the link between the film and the tragic murders.

In 1974, Polanski was back in Hollywood for his greatest triumph, "Chinatown", a tale of greed, corruption and incest set in 1930s Los Angeles. The director made a memorable impression on-screen, too, as the cocky gangster who slices Jack Nicholson's nose. Two years later, Polanski undertook his most arduous acting role, directing himself as the lead in "The Tenant". This profoundly unsettling but darkly comic portrait of a gradual descent into madness featured Polanski as a man who unravels after moving into the apartment of a woman who had committed suicide.

In 1977, Polanski was arrested in California on charges of unlawful sexual intercourse with a thirteen-year-old girl. He spent forty-two days under psychiatric observation in Chino, CA in compliance with a plea bargain. The judge subsequently wavered and--before further criminal proceedings could get underway--Polanski fled the United States. He made his next film, "Tess" (1979), in France. This acclaimed version of the Thomas Hardy novel "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" told the story of a beautiful country girl (Nastassja Kinski) who is systematically seduced by an older man. In 1981, he returned to Poland to direct and star in a stage production of "Amadeus".

Polanski's next film to achieve some degree of critical and commercial success was the suspenseful yet dreamy "Frantic" (1988), featuring Harrison Ford as an American in Paris searching for his missing wife (Betty Buckley). Also lensed in Paris was "Bitter Moon" (released abroad in 1992 but not in the US until 1994), which depicted a boat journey that for an upright Englishman (Hugh Grant) becomes a tortuous and dank voyage into the narrative of a wheelchair-bound would-be Henry Miller played by Peter Coyote. "Bitter Moon" also starred Polanski's wife Emmanuelle Seigner as the femme fatale destroyer/victim of the writer, 20 years her senior. This has encouraged critics, who were variously wowed, perplexed and repelled by the film, to read it as a refracted autobiography. It was obviously another variation on the director's preoccupation with psychic and sexual decay.

Polanski's "Death and the Maiden" (1994) was a widely acclaimed film adaptation of Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman's three character political allegory. Set in an unidentified South American country, the story follows a human-rights attorney (Stuart Wilson) who becomes stranded on a highway when his car breaks down. A kind doctor (Ben Kingsley) gives him a ride home where his wife (Sigourney Weaver) awaits. The wife immediately recognizes the doctor's voice as belonging to the man who supervised her torture under the previous regime. She takes him hostage, confronts him with her charges and puts him on trial before her lawyer husband. Even more claustrophobic than the play, the film powerfully considered issues of guilt and innocence and boasted powerhouse performances.

After a four-year hiatus Polanksi returned in 2000 with the thriller "The Ninth Gate," as director and one of the screenwriters, an adaptation of a French horror novel in which Johnny Depp plays a rare book collector seeking a manuscript featuring artwork created by Satan himself. That film did little to enhance or detract from the director's resume, but his next major work, 2002's "The Pianist," re-established Polanksi as a top-flight auteur. Working from the true story of acclaimed Polish composer Wladyslaw Szpilman, who narrowly escaped a roundup that sent his family to a Nazi death camp and struggled to survive until he was able to reclaim his artistic mastery, Polanski also drew on his own vivid recollections of escaping the Holocaust. The result was a triumphant, complex masterwork that moved audiences and critics worldwide and resulted in a new appreciation of the director's gifts, even as he still worked in European exile following his flight from the U.S. decades earlier. Even after "The Pianist" received a wealth of awards including an Oscar as Best Director for Polanski--the director, who had previously had a deal to dismiss the charges denied by the Los Angeles district attorney, announced that he had no plans to try to return to America to collect his accolades. In 2005 Polanksi won a libel suit against Vanity Fair after the magazine alleged that he attempted to seduce a woman at a New York eatery just days after his wife Tate was murdered by the Manson family. Later that year, the director realized a long-held ambition when he helmed a film adaptaion of Charles Dickens' classic novel "Oliver Twist" (2005). Like both Dickens and the titular character, Polanski had a hardscrabble youth that allowed him a very personal take on the material, and his vision was perhaps best distinguished by its sympathetic take on Fagin (Ben Kingsley) as someone who, yes, exploits his young pickpocket charges but also provides a better life than they might have known.

Polanski has had a minor but interesting career as an actor since childhood. At age 21, he won a featured role in Andrzej Wajda's first full-length film, "A Generation" (1954). Polanski would subsequently appear in Wajda's "Lotna" (1959), "Innocent Sorcerers" (1960) and "Samson" (1961). In addition to acting in many of his own shorts and features, Polanski had character parts and cameos in a number of European films. He was the charming but lethal Soviet gangster in the direct-to-video romantic thriller "Back in the U.S.S.R." (1992), appeared in a scripted role as himself in Michel Blanc's comedy-drama "Grosse Fatigue" (1994) and shone in a tour-de-force character lead opposite Gerard Depardieu in Giuseppe Tornatore's claustrophobic cat-and-mouse drama "A Pure Formality" (1994; released in the USA in 1995). In the latter, Polanski more than held his own against the French superstar, playing a "Columbo"-like inspector with fascistic undertones who interrogates a celebrated writer suspected of murder.

As an artist who exerts tremendous control over his films, often co-writing the screenplays and sometimes acting in them, Polanski instills his work with a uniquely personal worldview. His recurring themes are violence and victimization, isolation and alienation, and a profound sense of the absurd. The relationship between Polanski's personal life and his work has received a great deal of attention. While there are some strong parallels, focusing on this relationship has unfortunately tended to overshadow the surprising diversity of his films and eclipse his achievements as a filmmaker.

ROMAN POLANSKI PICTURES

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ROMAN POLANSKI BIOGRAPHY