Roman Polanski
Raymond Roman Thierry Polański is a Polish and French filmmaker and actor. He is the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, three British Academy Film Awards, ten César Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, as well as the Golden Bear and a Palme d'Or.
In 1977, Polanski was arrested in the United States for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sex with a minor in exchange for a probation-only sentence. The night before his sentencing hearing in 1978, he learned that the judge would likely reject the proffered plea bargain, so he fled the U.S. to Europe, where he continued his career. He remains a fugitive from the U.S. justice system. Subsequently, allegations of abuse have been made by several women.
Polanski's parents moved the family from his birthplace in Paris back to Kraków in 1937. Two years later, the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany started World War II, and the family found themselves trapped in the Kraków Ghetto. After his mother and father were taken in raids, Polanski spent his formative years in foster homes, surviving the Holocaust by adopting a false identity and concealing his half Jewish heritage. In 1969, Polanski's pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was murdered, along with four friends by members of the Manson Family in an internationally notorious case.
Polanski's first feature-length film, Knife in the Water, made in Poland, was nominated for the United States Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. A few years later he first left for France and then moved to the United Kingdom, where he directed his first three English-language feature-length films: Repulsion, Cul-de-sac, and The Fearless Vampire Killers. In 1968, he settled in the United States and cemented his status in the film industry by directing the horror film Rosemary's Baby. He made Macbeth in England and Chinatown back in Hollywood. His other critically acclaimed films include The Tenant, Tess, Death and the Maiden, The Pianist which won him the Academy Award for Best Director, The Ghost Writer, Venus in Fur, and An Officer and a Spy. Polanski has made 23 feature films to date. He has also starred in several Polish films as well as in his own films.
Early life
Roman Polanski was born on 18 August 1933, in interbellum Paris. He was the son of Bula Katz-Przedborska and Mojżesz Liebling, a painter and manufacturer of sculptures, who after World War II was known as Ryszard Polański. Polanski's father was Jewish and originally from Poland. Polanski's mother was born in Russia. Her own father was Jewish and mother was a Gentile, but Bula had been raised in the Catholic faith. She had a daughter, Annette, by her previous husband. Annette survived Auschwitz, where her mother was murdered, and left Poland forever for France. Polanski's parents were both agnostics. Polanski has stated that he is an atheist.World War II and the Holocaust
The Polański family moved back to Kraków, Poland, in early 1937, and were living there when World War II began with the invasion of Poland. Kraków was soon occupied by the German forces, and the racist and anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws made the Polańskis targets of persecution, forcing them into the Kraków Ghetto, along with thousands of the city's Jews. Around the age of six, Polanski attended primary school for only a few weeks, until "all the Jewish children were abruptly expelled", writes biographer Christopher Sandford. That initiative was soon followed by the requirement that all Jewish children over the age of twelve wear white armbands, with a blue Star of David imprinted, for visual identification. After he was expelled, Polanski was not allowed to enter another classroom for six years.Polanski's father was transferred, along with thousands of other Jews, to Mauthausen, a group of 49 German concentration camps in Austria. His mother, who was four months pregnant at the time, was taken to Auschwitz and killed in the gas chamber soon after arriving. The forced exodus took place immediately after the German liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, a real-life backdrop to Polanski's film The Pianist. Polanski, who was then hiding from the Germans, saw his father being marched off with a long line of people. Polanski tried getting closer to his father to ask him what was happening and got within a few yards. His father saw him, but afraid his son might be spotted by the German soldiers, whispered, "Get lost!"
Polanski escaped the Kraków Ghetto in 1943 and survived with the help of some Polish Roman Catholics, including a woman who had promised Polanski's father that she would shelter the boy. Polanski attended church, learned to recite Catholic prayers by heart, and behaved outwardly as a Roman Catholic, although he was never baptized. His efforts to blend into a Catholic household failed miserably at least once, when the parish priest visiting the family posed questions to him one-on-one about the catechism, and ultimately said, "You aren't one of us". The punishment for helping a Jew in German-occupied Poland was death.
As Polanski roamed the countryside trying to survive in a Poland now occupied by German troops, he witnessed many horrors, such as being "forced to take part in a cruel and sadistic game in which German soldiers took shots at him for target practice". The author Ian Freer concludes that Polanski's constant childhood fears and dread of violence have contributed to the "tangible atmospheres he conjures up on film". By the time the war ended in 1945, a fifth of the Polish population had been killed, the vast majority being civilians. Of those deaths, 3 million were Polish Jews, which accounted for 90% of the country's Jewish population. According to Sandford, Polanski used the memory of his mother, her dress and makeup style, as a physical model for Faye Dunaway's character in his film Chinatown.
In October 2020, Polanski went back to Poland and paid respects to a Polish couple who helped him hide and escape the Nazis. Stefania and Jan Buchala were recognized by Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, as "Righteous Among the Nations". Polanski recalled Stefania Buchala as being an "extremely noble" and courageous person.
After the war
After the war, Polanski was reunited with his father and moved back to Kraków. His father remarried on 21 December 1946 to Wanda Zajączkowska and died of cancer in 1984. Time repaired the family contacts; Polanski visited them in Kraków, and relatives visited him in Hollywood and Paris. Polanski recalls the villages and families he lived with as relatively primitive by European standards:Polanski stated that "you must live in a Communist country to really understand how bad it can be. Then you will appreciate capitalism." He also remembered events at the war's end and his reintroduction to mainstream society when he was 12, forming friendships with other children, such as Roma Ligocka, Ryszard Horowitz and his family.
Introduction to movies
Polanski's fascination with cinema began very early when he was around age four or five. He recalls this period in an interview:After the war, Polanski watched films, either at school or at a local cinema, using whatever pocket money he had. Polanski writes, "Most of this went on the movies, but movie seats were dirt cheap, so a little went a long way. I lapped up every kind of film." As time went on, movies became more than an escape into entertainment, as he explains:
Polanski was above all influenced by Carol Reed's Odd Man Out – "I still consider it as one of the best movies I've ever seen and a film which made me want to pursue this career more than anything else... I always dreamt of doing things of this sort or that style. To a certain extent I must say that I somehow perpetuate the ideas of that movie in what I do."
Early career in Poland
Polanski attended the National Film School in Łódź, the third-largest city in Poland. In the 1950s, Polanski took up acting, appearing in Andrzej Wajda's Pokolenie and in the same year in Silik Sternfeld's Zaczarowany rower. Polanski's directorial debut was also in 1955 with a short film, Rower. Rower is a semi-autobiographical feature film, believed to be lost, which also starred Polanski. It refers to his real-life violent altercation with a notorious Kraków felon, Janusz Dziuba, who arranged to sell Polanski a bicycle, but instead beat him badly and stole his money. In real life, the offender was arrested while fleeing after fracturing Polanski's skull, and executed for three murders, out of eight prior such assaults which he had committed. Several other short films made during his study at Łódź gained him considerable recognition, particularly Two Men and a Wardrobe and When Angels Fall. He graduated in 1959.Film director
1962–1976: Breakthrough and stardom
Knife in the WaterPolanski's first feature-length film, Knife in the Water, was also one of the first significant Polish films after the Second World War that did not have a war theme. Scripted by Jerzy Skolimowski, Jakub Goldberg, and Polanski, Knife in the Water is about a wealthy, unhappily married couple who decide to take a mysterious hitchhiker with them on a weekend boating excursion. Knife in the Water was a major commercial success in the West and gave Polanski an international reputation. The film also earned its director his first Academy Award nomination in 1963. Leon Niemczyk, who played Andrzej, was the only professional actor in the film. Jolanta Umecka, who played Krystyna, was discovered by Polanski at a swimming pool.
Polanski left then-communist Poland and moved to France, where he had already made two notable short films in 1961: The Fat and the Lean and Mammals. While in France, Polanski contributed one segment to the French-produced omnibus film, Les plus belles escroqueries du monde in 1964. However, Polanski found that in the early 1960s, the French film industry was xenophobic and generally unwilling to support a rising filmmaker of foreign origin.
Repulsion
Polanski made three feature films in England, based on original scripts written by himself and Gérard Brach, a frequent collaborator. Repulsion is a psychological horror film focusing on a young Belgian woman named Carol.
The film's themes, situations, visual motifs, and effects clearly reflect the influence of early surrealist cinema as well as horror movies of the 1950s—particularly Luis Buñuel's Un chien Andalou, Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Diabolique and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.
Cul-de-sac
Cul-de-sac is a bleak nihilist tragicomedy filmed on location in Northumberland. The tone and premise of the film owe a great deal to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, along with aspects of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party.
In 1966 Polanski co-produced the short film G.G. Passion, directed by David Bailey.
The Fearless Vampire Killers/Dance of the Vampires
The Fearless Vampire Killers is a parody of vampire films. The plot concerns a buffoonish professor and his clumsy assistant, Alfred, who are traveling through Transylvania in search of vampires. The Fearless Vampire Killers was Polanski's first feature to be photographed in color with the use of Panavision lenses, and included a striking visual style with snow-covered, fairy-tale landscapes, similar to the work of Soviet fantasy filmmakers. In addition, the richly textured color schemes of the settings evoke the paintings of the Belarusian-Jewish artist Marc Chagall, who provides the namesake for the innkeeper in the film. The film was written for Jack MacGowran, who played the lead role of Professor Abronsius.
Polanski met Sharon Tate while making the film; she played the role of the local innkeeper's daughter. They were married in London on 1968. Shortly after they married, Polanski, with Tate at his side during a documentary film, described the demands of young movie viewers who he said always wanted to see something "new" and "different".
Rosemary's Baby
Paramount studio head Robert Evans brought Polanski to America ostensibly to direct the film Downhill Racer, but told Polanski that he really wanted him to read the horror novel Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin to see if a film could be made out of it. Polanski read it non-stop through the night and the following morning decided he wanted to write as well as direct it. He wrote the 272-page screenplay in just over three weeks. The film, Rosemary's Baby, was a box-office success and became his first Hollywood production, thereby establishing his reputation as a major commercial filmmaker. The film, a horror-thriller set in trendy Manhattan, is about Rosemary Woodhouse, a young housewife who is impregnated by the devil. Polanski's screenplay adaptation earned him a second Academy Award nomination.
On 9 August 1969, while Polanski was working in London, his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and four other people were murdered at the Polanskis' residence in Los Angeles by cult leader Charles Manson's followers.
Macbeth
Polanski adapted Macbeth into a screenplay with the Shakespeare expert Kenneth Tynan. Jon Finch and Francesca Annis played the main characters. Hugh Hefner and Playboy Productions funded the 1971 film, which opened in New York and was screened in Playboy Theater. Hefner was credited as executive producer, and the film was listed as a "Playboy Production". It was controversial because of Lady Macbeth's being nude in a scene, and received an X rating because of its graphic violence and nudity. In his autobiography, Polanski wrote that he wanted to be true to the violent nature of the work and that he had been aware that his first project following Tate's murder would be subject to scrutiny and probable criticism regardless of the subject matter; if he had made a comedy he would have been perceived as callous.
What?
Written by Polanski and previous collaborator Gérard Brach, What? is a mordant absurdist comedy loosely based on the themes of Alice in Wonderland and Henry James. The film is a rambling shaggy dog story about the sexual indignities that befall a winsome young American hippie woman hitchhiking through Europe.
Chinatown
Polanski returned to Hollywood in 1973 to direct Chinatown for Paramount Pictures. The film is widely considered to be one of the finest American mystery crime movies, inspired by the real-life California Water Wars, a series of disputes over southern California water at the beginning of the 20th century.
It was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, including those for actors Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway. Robert Towne won for Best Original Screenplay. It also had actor-director John Huston in a supporting role, and was the last film Polanski directed in the United States. In 1991, the film was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" and it is frequently listed as among the best in world cinema.
The Tenant
Polanski returned to Paris for his next film, The Tenant, which was based on a 1964 novel by Roland Topor, a French writer of Polish-Jewish origin. In addition to directing the film, Polanski also played a leading role of a timid Polish immigrant living in Paris. Together with Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby, The Tenant can be seen as the third installment in a loose trilogy of films called the "Apartment Trilogy" that explores the themes of social alienation and psychic and emotional breakdown.
In 1978, Polanski became a fugitive from American justice and could no longer work in countries where he might face arrest or extradition.