Roman Polanski, the director who put persecution on screen while living as a fugitive

Roman Polanski

Photo: Georges Biard / CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	August 18, 1933 Paris, France
Occupation	Film Director
Known for	The Pianist, Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby
Awards	Academy Award · Palme d'Or · 2 César

The question the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences could not answer in 2018 — when it expelled him — is the one that still defines Roman Polanski’s position in cinema. Can a body of work be evaluated apart from the biography of its maker? Polanski’s filmography argues that the question is impossible to resolve cleanly: Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Pianist, and roughly a dozen other films that belong in any honest history of cinema share a résumé with a 1977 conviction for the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl, a flight from American justice that same year, and more than four decades of exile from the country where he made his biggest commercial success. The moral arithmetic refuses to work out neatly on either side.

He was born in Paris on August 18, 1933, to Polish-Jewish parents who returned the family to Kraków in 1936. When Germany invaded Poland three years later, the Kraków ghetto became the frame of his childhood. His mother, Bula, was deported to Auschwitz, where she died. His father, Ryszard, survived Mauthausen. The boy was sheltered by a series of Catholic families under a false identity, moving from house to house while the city was being dismantled around him. The experience would return — decades later, in The Pianist — not as memoir exactly, but as something closer to moral debt: the specific quality of attention that comes from having actually been there.

After the war, Polanski enrolled at the Łódź Film School, one of the most demanding film programs in Eastern Europe. Short films followed. His debut feature, Knife in the Water, made entirely in Poland in 1962, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and made him internationally legible before he had left the country. It is a chamber piece — three people on a sailboat, a power struggle that has nowhere to go — and it announced the concern with confined spaces and unstable hierarchies that would continue through every decade of his career.

He relocated to Britain, where he directed Repulsion in 1965 — a study of psychological disintegration so controlled it still feels airless — then Cul-de-sac and The Fearless Vampire Killers before moving to Hollywood. These early British films have been reassessed substantially since their release. Cul-de-sac in particular, long treated as a minor entry in his filmography, was selected for Venice Classics 2026 in a restored print — the kind of institutional re-evaluation that arrives only for work that has quietly accumulated credibility over time.

Rosemary’s Baby, released in 1968, was his American calling card: a horror film about female powerlessness and institutional complicity that was received at the time as a genre exercise and now reads as something more uncomfortable. It made him a marketable name at a moment when Hollywood was opening to European directors — and it inaugurated a recurring preoccupation with individuals trapped by systems that cannot or will not protect them.

The murders of August 1969 interrupted everything. His wife, actress Sharon Tate, eight months pregnant, was killed at their home by members of the Manson Family while Polanski was abroad. He was not there. The investigation that followed marked everything that came after, though Polanski himself has rarely spoken about it at length in public. The grief went into the films rather than onto the record.

Chinatown, released in 1974, is widely considered his finest American film — a neo-noir set in 1930s Los Angeles about water rights, municipal corruption, and the inevitability of losing, arriving at one of the most deliberately despairing endings in commercial cinema. Polanski plays a small role himself: the man who slits the protagonist’s nose. It was the last Hollywood film he completed before the arrest.

The 1977 case has never been legally resolved. Polanski pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor — a plea made after the original six charges were reduced as part of a negotiated agreement. He served forty-two days in psychiatric evaluation. When it became clear that the judge might reject the plea arrangement and impose a longer sentence, Polanski left the country before sentencing and has not returned since. The victim, Samantha Geimer, has written a memoir about the experience and has publicly requested on multiple occasions that the case be dismissed; courts have rejected those requests. In 2018, following additional allegations that emerged during the #MeToo movement, the Academy expelled him from membership. A civil lawsuit over a separate 1973 allegation was settled out of court in 2024. In February 2026, a film adaptation of Geimer’s memoir — directed by César-nominated French filmmaker Marina Ziolkowski — entered pre-sales at the European Film Market. The legal record has been fixed for decades. The public narrative around it keeps moving.

In the years that followed the 1977 flight — living first in London, then in Paris, eventually settling in France with periods in Switzerland — Polanski kept directing. Tess in 1979, Bitter Moon in 1992, Death and the Maiden in 1994, and The Ninth Gate in 1999 were made in European productions with international casts, none reaching the sustained critical altitude of Chinatown, most of them more interesting than their reception at the time suggested. Death and the Maiden in particular — an adaptation of Ariel Dorfman’s play about a torture survivor who believes she has found the man who tortured her — compresses enormous moral complexity into a single apartment and remains undervalued.

The Pianist was different. Released in 2002, it tells the story of Władysław Szpilman, a Jewish pianist who survived the Warsaw ghetto and the systematic destruction of the city around him. Polanski drew on his own childhood experience of ghetto life — not as illustration but as the specific quality of attention that comes from having been there, from knowing what it looks and sounds and smells like when a city is being taken apart street by street. The film won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Director the following year. Polanski accepted neither prize in person. At Cannes he appeared via video. At the Oscars, Harrison Ford accepted on his behalf. The standing ovation the Los Angeles audience gave to a film about Holocaust survival — for a director whose childhood had been shaped by the same historical event, and who could not enter the country to receive the award because of a criminal case that remained unresolved — was received differently by different people. The film itself, whatever position one takes on everything else, belongs among the serious works on that subject.

An Officer and a Spy, released in France in 2019 under its original title J’accuse, is about the wrongful conviction of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French Army officer, at the end of the nineteenth century. The system that convicted him knew he was innocent; it sustained the conviction anyway. The parallel to Polanski’s own legal situation — a man whose guilt was resolved by plea agreement but whose punishment was contested, and whose departure from the country before sentencing has produced forty-six years of institutional limbo — was not invisible to critics or audiences. The film won the César Award for Best Director, producing walkouts at the ceremony from members of the French film industry who objected. Whatever one thinks of the award, the film itself — as a piece of historical reconstruction and procedural storytelling — is among his most accomplished later works. The argument about whether it deserved the prize was conducted almost entirely on biographical grounds.

The Palace, a black comedy set in a luxury Swiss hotel on New Year’s Eve 1999, premiered at Venice in 2023 and received mixed reviews. In April 2026, at ninety-two, Polanski appeared in Łódź, Poland, for a screening of a new 4K restoration of The Pianist. The Venice Film Festival’s Classics section selected a restored print of Cul-de-sac for 2026 — the sixty-year-old film returning to the festival that first gave Polanski major international recognition.

He has been married to French actress Emmanuelle Seigner since 1989; they have two children, Morgane and Elvis. Seigner has appeared in several of his films, including Bitter Moon, The Ninth Gate, and Venus in Fur, and has spoken publicly in his defense through the years of legal proceedings.

Whether Polanski makes another film before the arc closes is a question his age makes more specific by the year. What already exists — the chamber thriller from Poland, the British psychological horror, the American neo-noir, the Holocaust memorial, the Dreyfus argument — is a body of work that refuses to settle into a simple verdict. Films about persecution and institutional failure, made by a man who has experienced persecution and inflicted harm: the biography and the body of work cannot be separated from each other, and cannot be synthesized into a clean conclusion either. That is where Roman Polanski’s career leaves cinema — not with a verdict, but with an unresolved charge that neither side has been able to dismiss.

Featured Films

Carnage (2011) — An Officer and a Spy (2019)

Tags: Roman Polanski, Polish cinema, Rosemary's Baby, An Officer and a Spy, Emmanuelle Seigner, The Pianist

Featured News — Roman Polanski

See all →

Related People

Featured Films

Featured News — Roman Polanski

Rosemary’s Baby Remains the Horror Masterpiece That Dread Built

The Greatest Horror Films of All Time, Ranked

Bitter Moon: A Car Crash of Eroticism and Farce

The Ninth Gate: A Gothic Thriller That Blurs Reality and Supernatural

Related People

Discussion