August 4, 2008. Copyright 2008, Graphic News. All rights reserved

Film director Roman Polanski, who survived the Holocaust and the murder of his wife, turns 75
By Susan Shepherd

LONDON, August 4, Graphic News:  Roman Polanski was almost 70, with 40 years of film-making behind him, by the time Hollywood handed him, in absentia, its highest accolade -- a Best Director Oscar at the 2003 Academy Awards. His winning film, The Pianist, tells the semi-autobiographical story of a young, orphaned Jew, trapped in a Polish ghetto. Creative talent, luck and a sympathetic enemy combine to ensure the musicianÕs survival. The same could be said of PolanskiÕs long, eventful career. Exiled from the United States 30 years ago, when he jumped bail after a rape conviction and fled to France, he remains an outsider, admired by many within the American film industry for his largely dark, troubled work which, at its best, portrays the human condition as frail, brutal and vulnerable.

The relatively peaceful existence he now enjoys with his third wife, Emanuelle Seigner, in Paris, the city of his birth, is in contrast to the decades in between. Aged only three when his Jewish-Catholic parents returned home from France to Cracow in 1937, he escaped the ghetto just as they were being deported to Nazi death camps. His mother perished, but his father survived and was reunited with Roman after the war. Meanwhile the child on the run, living hand-to-mouth, witnessed horrors and great hardship, but found refuge in the cinema and the German-language films which played throughout occupied Poland.

A graduate of the Lodz Film School, Polanski made a name for himself in Europe in the mid-60s with two films shot on location in England. Repulsion (1965) with Catherine Deneuve as a woman suffering a mental breakdown, and the sinister Cul-de-Sac (1966), both won prizes at the Berlin Film Festival. But it was his 1968 thriller, RosemaryÕs Baby, starring Mia Farrow as a woman impregnated by the devil, which brought Polanski -- and Farrow -- the breakthrough. By now living in California and married to Sharon Tate, a young actress he had met on the set of an earlier film, the director would later describe this period as Òthe happiest I ever was in my lifeÓ.  PolanskiÕs bliss was short-lived. On August 9, 1969, while he was out of the country, his heavily-pregnant wife and four others were murdered at the coupleÕs rented home by members of the Charles Manson cult.

Violence and paranoia became the hallmarks of PolanskiÕs films throughout the 1970s, notably his bloody remake of Macbeth (1971), and Chinatown (1974), in which he cast the little-known Jack Nicholson and made a cameo appearance in a scene in which he slits NicholsonÕs nose with a knife. It was not until 1979 that he was able to strike a more sublime note with Tess, based on Thomas HardyÕs classic novel, featuring the teenage Nastassja Kinski in the lead role. Fearing Britain would extradite him to the U.S. following the rape case -- the girl had been 13 -- Polanski was unable to use the English countryside as a location, but managed to pass off Brittany as 19th century Dorset. He directed Harrison Ford in the tense drama, Frantic (1988) and introduced Hugh Grant in Bitter Moon (1992).

In 2005, Polanski won a libel action in the British High Court, against Vanity Fair, which had alleged improper sexual behaviour on the day of Sharon TateÕs funeral. Polanski, who gave evidence from Paris via video link, said he fought the case not for his own reputation, but because it had dishonoured his late wifeÕs memory.
/ENDS