Roman Polanski

Roman Polanski: Survivor, Master, Fugitive

German soldiers in occupied Kraków once used a small Jewish boy for target practice. He escaped the ghetto in 1943 with the help of Polish Roman Catholics, memorised prayers he did not believe and attended church under a false Catholic identity, and lived. His mother, four months pregnant, had been sent to Auschwitz and killed in the gas chamber. Sixty-one years later that boy won an Academy Award for Best Director he could not collect in person, because he was — and remains — a fugitive from American justice.

A Childhood Inside the Catastrophe

Raymond Roman Thierry Liebling was born in Paris on 18 August 1933. The family moved to Kraków in 1937, two years before Nazi Germany invaded Poland and confined them to the Kraków Ghetto. At around six he was expelled from school with the other Jewish children. His father was transferred to Mauthausen and survived; his mother did not. By the end of the war in 1945, three million Polish Jews — ninety per cent of the country's Jewish population — were dead. Polanski's cinema has never stopped returning to enclosed rooms, watched apartments and the ordinary machinery of persecution; the source is not obscure.

Łódź and the Knife in the Water

He graduated from the National Film School in Łódź in 1959, having already drawn attention with the shorts *Two Men and a Wardrobe* (1958) and *When Angels Fall* (1959). His first feature, *Knife in the Water* (1962), a three-hander of sexual menace on a sailing boat, took an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Language Film and made him internationally visible almost immediately.

London, Hollywood, Rosemary's Baby

Between 1965 and 1967 he made three English-language films in Britain — *Repulsion*, *Cul-de-sac* and *The Fearless Vampire Killers* — building a signature out of claustrophobia and psychological disintegration. In 1968 he moved to the United States and directed *Rosemary's Baby*, a commercial hit that installed him among the leading directors of his generation. *Macbeth* followed in England in 1971, financed by Hugh Hefner and Playboy Productions.

Cielo Drive

In 1969, while Polanski was working in Europe, his pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate, and four others were murdered at their Los Angeles home by members of the Manson Family. Their unborn child was posthumously named Paul Richard Polanski. Charles Manson and his followers were convicted of first-degree murder in 1971. Polanski called it the greatest regret of his life and wrote that "Sharon's death is the only watershed in my life that really matters," describing how it replaced a "boundless, untroubled sea of expectations and optimism" with "ingrained pessimism... eternal dissatisfaction with life."

Chinatown, and Then the Crime

He returned to Hollywood in 1974 to make *Chinatown*, still widely regarded as the finest American crime film of its era and nominated for eleven Academy Awards. Three years later, on 11 March 1977, he was arrested at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel for the sexual assault of thirteen-year-old Samantha Gailey, now Samantha Geimer, who had modelled for him during a Vogue photo shoot. He was indicted on six counts including rape and pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor; five charges were dismissed. He served forty-two days of a ninety-day psychiatric evaluation at the California Institution for Men. Judge Laurence J. Rittenband had approved a bargain of time served plus probation, then — according to Polanski — signalled he would reject it and impose fifty years; Rittenband told associates, "I'll see this man never gets out of jail." On 31 January 1978, the night before sentencing, Polanski fled to London and then to France, whose citizenship has shielded him from extradition ever since. In a 1979 interview with the novelist Martin Amis he said: "If I had killed somebody, it wouldn't have had so much appeal to the press... fucking, you see, and the young girls."

Fugitive, Laureate, Defendant

He kept working and kept winning. *Tess* (1979) brought Césars for Best Picture and Best Director. *The Pianist* (2002), drawn from the world of his own childhood, took the Palme d'Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Director, which Harrison Ford accepted on his behalf. *The Ghost Writer* (2010) swept six European Film Awards, took four Césars and the Silver Bear for Best Director in Berlin. He has ten Césars, three BAFTAs, two Golden Globes, a Golden Bear, and a seat in the Académie des Beaux-Arts since 11 March 1998.

The law never let go. Geimer sued him in 1988; he settled confidentially, owing $604,416 as of August 1996. In 2008 she said, "I don't wish for him to be held to further punishment or consequences," and told Paris Match in March 2023 that "Roman has served his sentence." Switzerland arrested him on 26 September 2009 at American request, jailed him near Zurich for two months and confined him at Gstaad, then rejected extradition on 12 July 2010. A Polish judge refused extradition in October 2015 as "obviously unlawful"; Poland's Supreme Court dismissed the appeal in December 2016. Meanwhile further accusations accumulated: Charlotte Lewis in 2010 (alleged abuse in 1983, when she was sixteen), Renate Langer and Marianne Barnard in 2017, Valentine Monnier in 2019, and a 2023 Los Angeles civil suit over a 1973 assault that settled in October 2024. Polanski has denied all of them; he called Lewis's account "an odious lie" and was acquitted of defaming her on 14 May 2024. In May 2018 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences expelled him, one of only four members ever removed; a court upheld the expulsion in August 2020. Declining to attend the 2020 Césars, where he won Best Director for *An Officer and a Spy*, he refused what he called a "public lynching" and said "Fantasies of unhealthy minds are now treated as proven facts."

Why Roman Is Called a Genius

The specific gift is spatial dread: Polanski can make a room the antagonist. *Repulsion*, *Rosemary's Baby*, *The Tenant* and *Chinatown* all work by the same mechanism — a protagonist whose perception is slowly detached from a reality the audience cannot verify either, staged with unnervingly precise blocking and a camera that knows exactly how much to withhold. *Chinatown* is the textbook case: a detective plot in which every piece of information the hero acquires makes him more dangerous to the person he is trying to protect. The Venice festival head Alberto Barbera has defended showing his films by insisting "one cannot distinguish between the responsibilities of the man and those of the artist" — the standard defence, and itself contested.

The counter-case is not aesthetic modesty; it is moral. Polanski pleaded guilty to a sex crime against a child and fled sentencing, and several other women have since accused him. Skill of this order does not dissolve that, and the argument that it should is precisely what the Academy rejected in 2018. There is also a craft case against inflation: his output across 23 features is uneven, with much of the post-1980 work — *Pirates*, *The Ninth Gate*, *The Palace* — far below the standard of the great run. The claim is not that he is a moral thinker. It is that four or five of his films redefined how fear is built on screen.

Legacy

Polanski's career is the hardest test case modern cinema has for the separation of art and artist, and it has produced no settled answer — only tear gas outside the 2020 Césars, walkouts by Adèle Haenel and Céline Sciamma, defences from Fanny Ardant and Brigitte Bardot, and a victim who has spent decades asking to be left alone. What is not in dispute is the influence. Every film that traps a viewer inside an unreliable mind owes something to *Repulsion*; every neo-noir owes something to *Chinatown*.