If only he hadn’t… Today he would simply be considered a master director. But Roman Polanski raped 13-year-old Samantha Jane Gailey using narcotic drugs at Jack Nicholson’s Los Angeles estate in 1977. The charge was later: “extramarital sex with a minor”; Polanski pleaded guilty and fled to England, later to France. He never returned to the United States. A prosecutor continued to pursue him. Samantha Gailey has forgiven him.
Roman Polanski was always a burdened man. He was born Raymond Liebling in Paris, his Jewish grandparents came from Russia. The family moved to Kraków in 1937. His mother was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943, his father survived in the Mauthausen concentration camp. Roman escaped from the Kraków ghetto, hid with a Polish family and posed as a Catholic Jew. In January 1945, the Red Army liberated the ghetto. Polanski landed a role in a radio drama and became a child actor. Later film director Andrjez Wajda advised him to apply to the Lodz Film School, which he did. Polanski was still making his first short films in the 1950s. He married in 1959.
Five eventful years
His first feature film, Das Messer im Wasser (1962), is one of the best debut films of all time. He was nominated for an Oscar. Communist party leader Wladyslaw Gomulka is now semi-famous for calling the film “intellectually flat”. Polanski then emigrated to Paris. There – and later in the USA – he made what is probably the greatest series of films of the 1960s: “Ekel” (1965), “WENN Katelbach geht” (1966), “Tanz der Vampire” (1967) and “Rosemary’s Baby”. (1968). In between, he also wrote a few screenplays.
In the summer of 1969, Polanski’s pregnant friend Sharon Tate was murdered at her home on Cielo Drive by the Manson gang. She and Polanski had just inherited the home from music producer Terry Melcher.
Nobody knows how Roman Polanski survived. He made a radical Macbeth in 1971, then the documentary Weekend of a Champion. In 1974 he made Chinatown with Jack Nicholson, the screenplay was by Robert Towne.
After that he could make any film – and made the surrealistic horror film “The Tenant”, in which he played himself. He had to exorcise himself. After fleeing to Paris, he shot “Tess” with the beguiling Nastassja Kinski in 1979 – without success. In 1986 he directed the downright horrid film Pirates, a debacle. Two years later he saved himself with the Hitchcock pastiche “Frantic” with Harrison Ford. A strange and courageous artistic decision by Ford to shoot in Paris with the outlawed director. It’s a good thriller.
The outrageously erotic film Bitter Moon (starring Polanski’s wife Emmanuelle Seigner, Kristin Scott-Thomas and Hugh Grant) propelled Polanski to the turgid fringes of cinema. He made The Nine Gates, an occult thriller starring Johnny Depp (1999).
The Oscar came in the mail
And then “The Pianist”. This film is his memoir of the Kraków ghetto, of a Jewish piano player and an art-loving German soldier. In 2003, Roman Polanski won the Oscar for Best Director. It was sent to him.
Polanski made other decent films, The Ghost Writer (2010) and The God of Carnage (2011). He could do thrillers, he could do theatre, he could direct actors. What he couldn’t do anymore were films like “Ekel” and “Rosemary’s Baby”. But he could do it in such a way that hearing and seeing passed away.
On Friday (August 18) Roman Polanski will be 90 years old.