Biography traces the life and work of Roman Polanski
Now in his mid-70s, Roman Polanski seems finally to have slowed down a bit. He lives in France with his wife, Emmanuelle Seigner, and their two children, to whom he apparently is devoted. According to Christopher Sandford, people who know him "insist that Polanski is almost ludicrously mild-mannered." The "top moment" of his day, he has said, comes when he drops his children off at school.
As if to underscore his autumnal mood, three years ago Polanski released his 17th film, an adaptation of Charles Dickens' "Oliver Twist" that is surprisingly mellow, even sentimental, perhaps because he is believed to have made it for his children. It was released only three years after "The Pianist," one of the three films of his that rank among postwar classics - the others being "Knife in the Water" (1962) and "Chinatown" (1974) - and the one that brought him, at last, an Academy Award, and, with it, something approximating the acceptance and forgiveness of his peers.
Nobody who pays even the slightest attention to the headlines needs to be told that the past decade or so of Polanski's life stands in stark contrast to much of the rest of it. As a youth he discovered that he was catnip to the ladies and set out on a lifetime of serial seduction, often with girls far younger than he. In 1969 his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, was brutally murdered in Los Angeles by the Charles Manson "family." Then, in 1977, at the age of 43, he had sex with a 13-year-old girl in California. Faced with the possibility of a long prison sentence, Polanski left the United States in 1978 and has never returned.
Those are the most notorious scenes from a life that has had many. Born in Paris in 1933 to Jewish emigre parents from Poland, Polanski survived World War II under the most brutal circumstances and against staggering odds. His mother was killed at Auschwitz, and he was separated from his father for most of the war, left to roam the countryside and forage for survival.
The war certainly hardened him. Diminutive in size but physically strong and mentally tough, he was determined to succeed. As a boy he had fallen in love with movies; as a young man he set about learning how to make them. Accepted at Poland's National Film School in Lodz in 1953, he was able to study films by master Western filmmakers that the communist regime banned in public. He learned his lessons well. "Knife in the Water," released when he was not yet 30 years old, established him immediately as a leading director of his generation.
The film also set Polanski off on one of the most varied, unpredictable film careers of the past half-century. "As well as two satanic-cult pictures," Sandford writes, "his canon includes psychological thrillers, faithful adaptations of Shakespeare and Dickens, a costume melodrama, matinee swashbuckling, Hitchcockian suspense, Thirties noir, excursions in absurdism and soft porn, sometimes concurrently, and a deranged Dracula spoof in which a Jewish vampire hunter, played by Polanski himself, repeatedly peers through a keyhole at a naked woman who happens to be Sharon Tate." The most famous satanic-cult movie is of course "Rosemary's Baby" (1968), which made Polanski a force in Hollywood.
For me, the high achievement of Polanski's career came six years later, with "Chinatown." Though Sandford calls "The Pianist" Polanski's "masterpiece," for me that accolade must be bestowed upon this story of greed, corruption and betrayal in Los Angeles in the 1930s.
Over the years, Polanski has lived for his work, and it is by his work that he must be judged. In this fine biography, Sandford gives those films the praise they deserve, and he is fair as well to Polanski the man.
"Polanski"
Author: Christopher Sandford
Publisher: Palgrave, $29.95