Roman Polanski |
Roman Polanski | |
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![]() Polanski at the | |
Born | Rajmund Roman Thierry Polański 18 August 1933 |
Citizenship | Poland, France[1] |
Occupation | Film director, producer, writer, actor |
Years active | 1953–present |
Spouse(s) |
|
Children | 2; including |
Capture status | International fugitive[2] |
Wanted by | |
Wanted since | 1978 |
Rajmund Roman Thierry Polański (
Polanski was born in Paris, and his
A turning point in his life took place in 1969, when his pregnant wife,
In 1977, Polanski was arrested and charged with
In Europe, Polanski continued to make films, including
In 2018, in light of the
Polanski was born in
The Polański family moved back to the Polish city of
I had just been visiting my grandmother ... when I received a foretaste of things to come. At first I didn't know what was happening. I simply saw people scattering in all directions. Then I realized why the street had emptied so quickly. Some women were being herded along it by German soldiers. Instead of running away like the rest, I felt compelled to watch.
One older woman at the rear of the column couldn't keep up. A German officer kept prodding her back into line, but she fell down on all fours, ... Suddenly a pistol appeared in the officer's hand. There was a loud bang, and blood came welling out of her back. I ran straight into the nearest building, squeezed into a smelly recess beneath some wooden stairs, and didn't come out for hours. I developed a strange habit: clenching my fists so hard that my palms became permanently calloused. I also woke up one morning to find that I had wet my bed.[23]
His father was transferred, along with thousands of other Jews, to
Polański escaped the Kraków Ghetto in 1943 and survived by assuming the name Romek Wilk, with the
As he roamed the countryside trying to survive in a Poland now occupied by German troops, he witnessed many horrors, such as being "forced to take part in a cruel and sadistic game in which German soldiers took shots at him for target practice."[10] Author
By the time the war ended in 1945, a
After the war, he was reunited with his father and moved back to Kraków. His father remarried 21 December 1946 to Wanda Zajączkowska (a woman Polanski had never liked) and died of cancer in 1984. Time repaired the family contacts; Polanski visited them in Kraków, and relatives visited him in Hollywood and Paris. Polanski recalls the villages and families he lived with as relatively primitive by European standards:
They were really simple Catholic peasants. This Polish village was like the English village in Tess. Very primitive. No electricity. The kids with whom I lived didn't know about electricity ... they wouldn't believe me when I told them it was enough to turn on a switch![28]
He stated that "you must live in a
Polanski's fascination with cinema began very early, when he was around age four or five. He recalls this period in an interview:
Even as a child, I always loved cinema and was thrilled when my parents would take me before the war. Then we were put into the ghetto in Krakòw and there was no cinema, but the Germans often showed newsreels to the people outside the ghetto, on a screen in the market place. And there was one particular corner where you could see the screen through the barbed wire. I remember watching with fascination, although all they were showing was the German army and German tanks, with occasional anti-Jewish slogans inserted on cards.[30]
After the war, he watched films, either at school or at a local cinema, using whatever pocket money he had. Polanski writes, "Most of this went on the movies, but movie seats were dirt cheap, so a little went a long way. I lapped up every kind of film."[31] As time went on, movies became more than an escape into entertainment, as he explains:
Movies were becoming an absolute obsession with me. I was enthralled by everything connected with the cinema—not just the movies themselves but the aura that surrounded them. I loved the luminous rectangle of the screen, the sight of the beam slicing through the darkness from the projection booth, the miraculous synchronization of sound and vision, even the dusty smell of the tip-up seats. More than anything else though, I was fascinated by the actual mechanics of the process.[32]
He was above all influenced by Sir