72 Facts About Roman Polanski

Raymond Roman Thierry Polanski is a French and Polish film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor.

Roman Polanski is the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, two British Academy Film Awards, nine Cesar Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, as well as the Golden Bear and a Palme d'Or.

Roman Polanski made Macbeth in England and Chinatown back in Hollywood.

Roman Polanski was the son of Bula Katz-Przedborska and Mojzesz Liebling, a painter and manufacturer of sculptures, who after World War II was known as Ryszard Polanski.

Roman Polanski's father was Jewish and originally from Poland; Roman Polanski's mother, born in Russia, had been raised Catholic but was half Jewish.

Roman Polanski's mother had a daughter, Annette, by her previous husband.

Around the age of six, Roman Polanski attended primary school for only a few weeks, until "all the Jewish children were abruptly expelled", writes biographer Christopher Sandford.

Roman Polanski witnessed both the ghettoization of Krakow's Jews into a compact area of the city, and the subsequent deportation of all the ghetto's Jews to German death camps.

Roman Polanski remembers from age six, one of his first experiences of the terrors to follow:.

Roman Polanski's father was transferred, along with thousands of other Jews, to Mauthausen, a group of 49 German concentration camps in Austria.

Roman Polanski tried getting closer to his father to ask him what was happening and got within a few yards.

Polanski escaped the Krakow 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.

Roman Polanski's father remarried on 21 December 1946 to Wanda Zajaczkowska and died of cancer in 1984.

Time repaired the family contacts; Roman Polanski visited them in Krakow, and relatives visited him in Hollywood and Paris.

Roman Polanski recalls the villages and families he lived with as relatively primitive by European standards:.

Roman 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.

Roman Polanski made three feature films in England, based on original scripts written by himself and Gerard Brach, a frequent collaborator.

Roman Polanski met Sharon Tate while making the film; she played the role of the local innkeeper's daughter.

Roman Polanski read it non-stop through the night and the following morning decided he wanted to write as well as direct it.

Roman Polanski wrote the 272-page screenplay in just over three weeks.

Roman Polanski adapted Macbeth into a screenplay with the Shakespeare expert Kenneth Tynan.

Roman Polanski returned to Hollywood in 1973 to direct Chinatown for Paramount Pictures.

Roman 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 1978, Roman Polanski became a fugitive from American justice and could no longer work in countries where he might face arrest or extradition.

Roman Polanski dedicated his next film, Tess, to the memory of his late wife, Sharon Tate.

Roman Polanski offered her the starring role, which she accepted.

Roman Polanski's father was Klaus Kinski, a leading German actor, who had introduced her to films.

Roman Polanski was strict with me, but in a good way.

Roman Polanski made me feel smart, that I could do things.

Roman Polanski won France's Cesar Awards for Best Picture and Best Director and received his fourth Academy Award nomination.

In 1981, Roman Polanski directed and co-starred in a stage production of Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus, first in Warsaw, then in Paris.

In 1992 Roman Polanski followed with the dark psycho-sexual film Bitter Moon.

In 1994 Roman Polanski directed a film of the acclaimed play Death and the Maiden.

In 1997, Roman Polanski directed a stage version of his 1967 film The Fearless Vampire Killers, which debuted in Vienna followed by successful runs in Stuttgart, Hamburg, Berlin, and Budapest.

On 1998, Roman Polanski was elected a member of the Academie des Beaux-Arts.

Roman Polanski later received the Crystal Globe award for outstanding artistic contribution to world cinema at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 2004.

Roman Polanski said in interviews that he made the film as something he could show his children and that the life of the young scavenger mirrored his own life, fending for himself in World War II Poland.

When it premiered at the 60th Berlinale in February 2010, Roman Polanski won a Silver Bear for Best Director, and in February 2011, it won four Cesar Awards, France's version of the Academy Awards.

Harris and Roman Polanski had previously worked for many months on a film of Harris's earlier novel Pompeii, a novel that was actually inspired by Roman Polanski's Chinatown.

Roman Polanski worked with the play's author, David Ives, on the screenplay.

Roman Polanski's Based on a True Story is an adaptation of the French novel by bestselling author Delphine de Vignan.

However, production was postponed after Roman Polanski moved to Poland for filming and the US Government filed extradition papers.

In February 2020, Roman Polanski won Best Director at France's 2020 Cesar Awards.

The actor Lambert Wilson called the protest campaign against Roman Polanski "abominable public lynching", as did Isabelle Huppert, who stated that "lynching is a form of pornography".

In October 2020, Roman Polanski went back to Poland and paid respects to a Polish couple who helped him hide and escape the Nazis.

Roman Polanski recalled Stefania Buchala as being an "extremely noble" and courageous person.

Roman Polanski co-wrote the screenplay with fellow Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, who co-wrote Roman Polanski's first feature, Knife in the Water, in 1962.

Roman Polanski starred in his short film When Angels Fall.

Roman Polanski met actress Sharon Tate while filming The Fearless Vampire Killers, and during the production, the two of them began dating.

Roman Polanski has said that his absence on the night of the murders is the greatest regret of his life.

Roman Polanski was left with a negative impression of the press, which he felt was interested in sensationalizing the lives of the victims, and indirectly himself, to attract readers.

Roman Polanski was shocked by the lack of sympathy expressed in various news stories:.

In 1977, Roman Polanski was arrested and charged with drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.

Roman Polanski was going to sentence Polanski, rather than to time served, to fifty years.

Roman Polanski was told by his attorney that "the judge could no longer be trusted" and that the judge's representations were "worthless".

On 26 September 2009, Roman Polanski was arrested while in Switzerland at the request of United States authorities.

Roman Polanski was defended by many prominent individuals, including Hollywood celebrities and European artists and politicians, who called for his release.

Roman Polanski was jailed near Zurich for two months, then put under house arrest at his home in Gstaad while awaiting the results of his extradition appeals.

Roman Polanski's name is no longer found on Interpol's wanted list.

In January 2014, newly uncovered emails from 2008 by a Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge, Larry P Fidler, indicated that if Polanski returned to the United States for a hearing, the conduct of the judge who had originally presided over the case, Laurence A Rittenband, might require that Polanski be freed.

In late October 2014, Roman Polanski was questioned by prosecutors in Krakow.

The Krakow prosecutor's office declined to challenge the court's ruling, agreeing that Roman Polanski had served his punishment and did not need to face a US court again.

On 3 May 2018, Roman Polanski was removed from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, with the decision referencing the case.

In 2008, the documentary film by Marina Zenovich, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, was released in Europe and the United States where it won numerous awards.

In 2004, Roman Polanski sued Vanity Fair magazine in London for libel.

Roman Polanski received supporting testimony from Mia Farrow, and Vanity Fair "was unable to prove that the incident occurred".

In November 2022, Roman Polanski filed a cybersquatting dispute with World Intellectual Property Organization against the domain name imetpolanski.

Roman Polanski asked World Intellectual Property Organization to rule that the site was cybersquatting.

However, the three-person panel ruled that Roman Polanski didn't show the domain was registered and used in bad faith, nor did he show that the registrant, Matan Uziel, lacked rights or legitimate interests in the domain name.

In 2010, British actress Charlotte Lewis said that Roman Polanski had "forced himself" on her while she was auditioning for a role in Paris in 1983, when she was 16 and he was 50.

In that interview, Lewis asserted that she had a six-month tryst with Polanski when she was 17: "I knew that Roman had done something bad in the United States, but I wanted to be his mistress," Lewis said, according to Liberation.

In September 2022, Roman Polanski was ordered to stand trial in France for Lewis' defamation case.