After his mother and father were taken in raids, Polanski spent his formative years in foster homes, surviving the Holocaust by adopting a false identity and concealing his Jewish heritage.

[8] After living in France for a few years, he moved to the United Kingdom, where he directed his first three English-language feature-length films: Repulsion (1965), Cul-de-sac (1966), and The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967).

His other critically acclaimed films include The Tenant (1976), Tess (1979), The Pianist (2002) which won him the Academy Award for Best Director, The Ghost Writer (2010), Venus in Fur (2013), and An Officer and a Spy (2019).

That initiative was soon followed by the requirement that all Jewish children over the age of twelve wear white armbands, with a blue Star of David imprinted, for visual identification.

His efforts to blend into a Catholic household failed miserably at least once, when the parish priest visiting the family posed questions to him one-on-one about the catechism, and ultimately said, "You aren't one of us".

The author Ian Freer concludes that Polanski's constant childhood fears and dread of violence have contributed to the "tangible atmospheres he conjures up on film".

[24] According to Sandford, Polanski would use the memory of his mother, her dress and makeup style, as a physical model for Faye Dunaway's character in his film Chinatown (1974).

"[26] He also remembered events at the war's end and his reintroduction to mainstream society when he was 12, forming friendships with other children, such as Roma Ligocka, Ryszard Horowitz and his family.

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.

It refers to his real-life violent altercation with a notorious Kraków felon, Janusz Dziuba, who arranged to sell Polanski a bicycle, but instead beat him badly and stole his money.

Scripted by Jerzy Skolimowski, Jakub Goldberg, and Polanski,[34] Knife in the Water is about a wealthy, unhappily married couple who decide to take a mysterious hitchhiker with them on a weekend boating excursion.

While in France, Polanski contributed one segment ("La rivière de diamants") to the French-produced omnibus film, Les plus belles escroqueries du monde (English title: The Beautiful Swindlers) in 1964.

The film's themes, situations, visual motifs, and effects clearly reflect the influence of early surrealist cinema as well as horror movies of the 1950s—particularly Luis Buñuel's Un chien Andalou, Jean Cocteau's The Blood of a Poet, Henri-Georges Clouzot's Diabolique and Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

The tone and premise of the film owe a great deal to Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, along with aspects of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party.

The Fearless Vampire Killers was Polanski's first feature to be photographed in color with the use of Panavision lenses, and included a striking visual style with snow-covered, fairy-tale landscapes, similar to the work of Soviet fantasy filmmakers.

In addition, the richly textured color schemes of the settings evoke the paintings of the Belarusian-Jewish artist Marc Chagall, who provides the namesake for the innkeeper in the film.

The film is a rambling shaggy dog story about the sexual indignities that befall a winsome young American hippie woman hitchhiking through Europe.

Film critic Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "Whatever else Mr. Polanski may be – nasty, mocking, darkly subversive in his view of the world – he definitely isn't dull.

The movie's plot is based on the idea that an ancient text called "The Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows", authored by Aristide Torchia along with Lucifer, is the key to raising Satan.

The film is a screen version of Yasmina Reza's play God of Carnage, a comedy about two couples who meet after their children get in a fight at school, and how their initially civilized conversation devolves into chaos.

Following its expulsion of Harvey Weinstein,[104] the Academy's Standards of Conduct had recently been revised as a result of impacts of the #MeToo and Time's Up movements on the film industry.

[137] The film stars Mickey Rourke, Fanny Ardant, and Oliver Masucci,[138] and is a black comedy about the guests at a Swiss luxury hotel on New Year's Eve 1999.

The film was unable to find financing in France due to souring French public opinion of Polanski following a new round of sexual assault allegations, and ended up being primarily funded by the Italian company, RAI Cinema.

[164] As a result of the plea bargain, Polanski pleaded guilty to the charge of "unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor",[165][166] and was ordered to undergo 90 days of psychiatric evaluation at California Institution for Men at Chino.

[181] The victim, now married and going by the name Samantha Geimer, stated in a 2003 interview with Larry King that the police and media had been slow at the time of the assault to believe her account, which she attributed to the social climate of the era.

[184] American public opinion was reported to run against him,[185][186] and polls in France and Poland showed that strong majorities favored his extradition to the United States.

[197] On 30 October 2015, Polish judge Dariusz Mazur denied a request by the United States to extradite Polanski, who has dual French–Polish citizenship, for a full trial, claiming that it would be "obviously unlawful".

"[204][205] 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.

[216] In late December 2019, in Polanski's interviews with Paris Match[217] and Gazeta Wyborcza,[218] the latter accused Matan Uziel of carefully orchestrating the attacks on his character and for playing a major role in designing an international campaign to besmirch his name and reputation in order to make his career fall from grace.

[222] In 2010, lawyer Gloria Allred appeared in a press conference with British actress Charlotte Lewis, where she stated that Polanski had forced himself on her while she was auditioning for Pirates in Paris in 1983, which she was later cast in.