Roman Polanski is a French-Polish film director. He has been nominated for several Academy Awards and has won the César Award in France and the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. While he is a celebrated filmmaker, Polanski's reputation has been overshadowed by his 1977 arrest for drugging and raping a thirteen-year-old girl, which resulted in Polanski fleeing the United States to avoid a prison sentence. He has continued directing films while living in Europe.
Polanski was born in Paris to a Jewish father and a Russian Roman-Catholic mother. When Polanski was a child, his family moved to Poland, where they were ghettoized along with other Jewish families during the German Nazi occupation. This experience was extremely impactful for the young Polanski, who would use many of his experiences to inform his filmmaking. After a brief acting career, Polanski made his first feature film, Knife in the Water, which brought him international attention. Polanski's first American film, Rosemary's Baby (1968), was a box-office success and earned Polanski a second Oscar nomination. In 1969, Roman Polanski's wife, Sharon Tate, was murdered at his Los Angeles home by followers of Charles Manson while Polanski was in London. In 1974, he returned to Hollywood to make Chinatown, which was nominated for eleven Academy Awards.
In 1977, Polanski was arrested in Beverly Hills for the sexual assault of Samantha Gailey, a thirteen-year-old who had modeled for Polanski during a Vogue photoshoot at the home of Jack Nicholson. In exchange for dropping five charges against Polanski, Gailey's lawyer arranged a plea bargain in which Polanski pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor. Upon learning the judge intended to reject the plea deal and might sentence him to fifty years in prison, Polanski flew to France, where his citizenship prevented and continues to prevent him from being extradited to face sentencing in the U.S. In 1988, Gailey sued Polanski and confirmed in 1997 that a confidential financial settlement had been reached. Gailey has been critical of the media's sensationalized treatment of the case.
Set in 1937 and starring Jack Nicholson, Roman Polanski's neo-noir film Chinatown (1974) is about a private investigator who uncovers a conspiracy involving corrupt management of the Los Angeles water supply. The film was inspired by a series of...
The Pianist is a 2002 film by Roman Polanski based on the true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman's survival during the German occupation of Warsaw in 1942. It was directed by Roman Polanski and written by Ronald Harwood, and it met with widespread...
Rosemary's Baby is a 1968 psychological horror film directed by Roman Polanski, with a screenplay adapted from Ira Levin's best's selling 1967 novel of the same name. It was Polanski's first feature to be distributed by a major Hollywood studio...
