Roman Polanski

The original three foot Pole that no one - least of all teenage girls - wants to be touched by,  Roman Polanski has had an eventful life.  He lost one family to Adolf Hitler and another to Charles Manson.  If that isn’t enough to mess anyone up he also had to direct Faye Dunaway at the height of her career.  Suffice it to say she’s one actress who didn’t end up as a notch on the diminutive lothario’s belt.

Amid all the hysteria about Polanski the statutory rapist and sodomite - there is no doubt about how he drugged and abused a 13 year old back in 1977, merely about how he should pay for the crime - the strengths of Polanski the filmmaker have often been overlooked.  The most renowned Polish director after one time mentor Andrzej Wajda, Polanski traded the early success of student surrealist shorts like “Two Men and a Wardrobe”(1958) into an assured professional feature debut with the psychological thriller “Knife in the Water” (1962).  Thereafter active in Britain, Polanski’s early potential was fully realised in his first masterpiece, “Repulsion” (1965), a study of sexual repression featuring Catherine Deneuve at her most stunningly cold. 

“Repulsion”’s expressionistic use of shadow and eerie dream sequences recommended him to a Hollywood willing to forgive his next two, non commercial features: “Cul de Sac” (1966), an interesting experiment, and “The Fearless Vampire Killers” (1967), a misstep into comedy.  Having a solid commercial hit adapting Ira Levin’s “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968), Polanski returned briefly to England to film a “Playboy” financed “Macbeth” before enjoying his greatest achievement with “Chinatown” (1974), a neo-noir whose cynicism reflected the mindset of someone whose wife had been murdered by a madman.

His career adversely affected by the fact of being a fugitive from Uncle Sam’s justice, Polanski nonetheless enjoyed subsequent success as an European auteur.  Improbably, he became the oldest and only criminal winner of the Best Director Oscar after drawing on the experiences of his youth in making the Holocaust drama “The Pianist” in 2002.