Roman Polanski, the director whose masterpiece changed cinema and settled nothing

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: Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, The Pianist, and roughly a dozen other films that belong to any honest history of cinema sit in the same résumé as a 1977 conviction for the rape of a thirteen-year-old girl, a flight from American justice that same year, and forty-six years of exile from the country that gave him his biggest commercial success.

He was born in Paris on August 18, 1933, to Polish-Jewish parents who moved the family back 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 around him was being systematically destroyed. The experience would return — decades later, in The Pianist — not as autobiography exactly, but as something closer to moral obligation.

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.

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 Dance of the Vampires before moving to Hollywood. Rosemary’s Baby, released in 1968, was his American calling card: a horror film about female powerlessness that was received then 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.

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 grief and the investigation that followed marked everything that came after, though Polanski himself has rarely spoken about it at length in public.

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

In the years that followed — living first in London, then in Paris, eventually in Switzerland and back to France — Polanski kept working. Tess in 1979, Bitter Moon in 1992, The Ninth Gate in 1999, and Death and the Maiden in 1994 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.

The Pianist was different. Released in 2002, it tells the story of Władysław Szpilman, a Jewish pianist who survived the Warsaw ghetto and the city’s systematic destruction. It 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, he was represented by Harrison Ford. 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 — was received differently by different people.

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, which included rape by use of drugs, were reduced as part of a negotiated agreement. He served forty-two days in psychiatric evaluation. When it became apparent that the judge might reject the plea arrangement and impose a more severe sentence, Polanski left the country before sentencing. He has not returned. The victim, Samantha Geimer, has written a memoir about the experience and has repeatedly requested 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. A 2024 civil lawsuit over a separate 1973 allegation was settled out of court. His own account, set out in a 1984 autobiography, acknowledges the facts of the case while disputing the circumstances around his departure.

An Officer and a Spy, released in France in 2019 under its original title J’accuse, is about the Dreyfus Affair — the French Army’s wrongful conviction of Jewish officer Alfred Dreyfus at the end of the nineteenth century. It won the César Award for Best Director, sparking walkouts at the ceremony from members of the French film industry who objected to the award going to Polanski. The Palace, a black comedy set in a luxury Swiss hotel on New Year’s Eve 1999, was his most recent film, premiering at Venice in 2023.

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.

In April 2026, at ninety-two, Polanski appeared in Łódź, Poland, for a 4K screening of The Pianist. A restored print of Cul-de-sac was selected for the Venice Film Festival’s Classics section. He has announced plans to shoot a new film in Poland — work which, if it happens, will constitute the final chapter of a directorial career that has moved, for more than six decades, in the space between undeniable artistic achievement and unresolved moral reckoning.

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Tags: Jack Nicholson, roman polanski, Emmanuelle Seigner, An Officer and a Spy, Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby

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