Profile/Roman Polanski: The film-maker's successful libel case against Vanity Fair reminded the world of an extraordinary life, writes Donald Clarke.
On Tuesday Tom Shields QC offered the high court in London a few words from the autobiography of Roman Polanski. "'For as far back as I can remember the line between fantasy and reality has been hopelessly blurred,'" he quoted. "That sums it up, doesn't it, Mr Polanski?" The Polish director's response, delivered via video link from Paris, was four-lettered and scatological.
Shields was acting for Condé Nast, the publisher of Vanity Fair, in one of the juicier libel cases of the season. A 2002 article in that magazine suggested that Polanski had propositioned a young woman a few hours before the funeral of his murdered wife, Sharon Tate. Knowing that the director, a fugitive from the American courts since being convicted of statutory rape in 1977, was unable to set foot in the US, Vanity Fair's editors may have felt he would be unable or unwilling to sue. They underestimated their subject's determination.
Polanski's lawyers, acting in the UK, where plaintiffs are seen to be at an advantage in libel cases, pursued their client's right to give evidence by video all the way to the House of Lords. They succeeded and Polanski was able to appear as a witness without opening himself up to extradition proceedings. Yesterday he won the case and was awarded £50,000 (€72,000) in damages.
In quoting from Polanski's book, Shields was suggesting that the plaintiff had already declared himself a habitual liar. Those who have followed this extraordinary director's career over the years may understand the passage differently.
From the early 1960s to the time of his flight from America, Polanski put together a sequence of films of startling, unsettling brilliance.
Knife in the Water (1962) was a claustrophobic warning against yachting with strangers. Repulsion (1965) saw Catherine Deneuve go beautifully bonkers in South Kensington. Rosemary's Baby (1968) starred Mia Farrow (a witness in the current trial) as the Devil's mum. Chinatown (1974) was simply one of the very best American films. A cool, fatalistic pessimism runs through all these pictures. One gets the sense that whatever good the characters may do, murder, possession, and madness will not be resisted.
By the time Polanski was 20 he had already endured more suffering than most of us experience in a lifetime. Later, when his affairs seemed to have sorted themselves out, Charles Manson's group of followers, the Family - the final, coughed-up sputum of the 1960s counterculture - burst into Polanski's Los Angeles home and butchered the heavily pregnant Tate. All those poisonous adventures hang about his films. Just as Spielberg's work is suffused with the cosy suburban trauma of his own youth - Dad's run off with his secretary and forgotten little Chuck's birthday again - so too is Polanski's laden with real, middle-European calamity. This surely is the real relevance of that phrase about blurring fantasy into reality.
ROMAN POLANSKI WAS born in Paris to a Jewish father and a Roman Catholic mother. In 1937, when the boy was three-years-old, his parents made a tragic mistake: they moved back home to Poland. After the German invasion the family was gathered into the ghetto, but, assisted by his father, Roman managed to escape through a hole in a fence before the trucks to the death camps arrived. In scenes that would be recalled in his 2002 film The Pianist, he spent the war years wandering about the country accepting kindness from strangers, always aware of death at his elbow. Later he discovered that his mother had died in Auschwitz. His father was also detained in a concentration camp, but survived.
Polanski attended art college and then the distinguished Lodz Film School. In the aftermath of the Polish October of 1956, censorship was relaxed and a new generation of film-makers - Andrzej Wajda, Jerzy Kawalerowicz, Andrzej Munk - began gaining a reputation within the country and at international festivals. The near-legendary short films that Polanski made at about the same time are less political and more absurd than those of this so-called Polish School. His flawless debut feature Knife in the Water, in which two men and a woman flirt and feud on a yacht, appeared to carry no obvious social message, but the government still found plenty to hate. It was "neither typical of nor relevant to" Polish society, Wladyslaw Gomulka, first secretary of the Communist Party, fumed.
Eager for freedom, Polanski moved first to Britain where he fell in with the legendary impresario of exploitation, Tony Tenser. It was an unusual partnership and Tenser, whose other credits include Naked as Nature Intended and The Blood Beast Terror, was astonished when their first collaboration, Repulsion, became an art-house phenomenon.
Cul-de-Sac, less financially successful, but just as highly praised, followed.
Eventually Polanski caught the eye of the flamboyant Hollywood producer Robert Evans, then head of production at Paramount. The two men fought like ferrets in a shoebox throughout Rosemary's Baby, but when the film turned out to be Evans's first big hit, he felt able to say: "I love that little Polack". A little over 20 years after his terrible wartime experiences, Polanski found himself ensconced in the Hollywood Hills being courted by the era's biggest stars. He married Sharon Tate in 1968, the year that Rosemary's Baby was completed. If there was ever a point at which he might have shaken off his grim fatalism this was it. Then Manson's Family came calling.
THE VANITY FAIR story, quoting the distinguished journalist Louis Lapham as a witness, suggested that, after dropping into a restaurant on the way to the funeral, Polanski slid his hand up a Swedish model's leg and offered to make her "the next Sharon Tate". The magazine has since had to admit it got its dates wrong and that, if the incident did happen, it happened several weeks later. This was not altogether good news for Polanski, who has owned up to having casual sex within four weeks of his wife's death. Mia Farrow stood by her old friend. "I feel there's a big distinction - for men maybe - between relationships and having sex," she said in court. "I don't see that as disrespect of Sharon." All of which goes to prove nothing more useful than Roman Polanski isn't much like the rest of us. Everybody close to him maintains that he was devastated by Tate's death and amateur psychoanalysts have noted that his first film after the murder, a brutal, muddy adaptation of Shakespeare's Macbeth, is the most blood-drenched of his career.
Others have seen echoes of the trauma in the final scene of Chinatown. Robert Towne, the film's scriptwriter, originally wanted Faye Dunaway's cool, damaged Evelyn Mulwray to kill her abusive father, Noah Cross, in the last few frames. Polanski was having none of it. He felt Cross, played with diabolical relish by John Huston, should escape and Evelyn should perish. The director eventually triumphed. "Roman's argument was: that's life. Beautiful blondes die in Los Angeles. Sharon had," Towne said later. The line between fantasy and reality blurred again.
Chinatown marked the end of Polanski's artistic purple patch. Following a romp in (where else?) Jack Nicholson's jacuzzi, he was arrested and charged with the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl, Samantha Geimer. Originally it looked as if his lawyers might be able to negotiate a plea bargain, but when the judge began to make aggressive noises, Polanski, who admitted to the act, but not to any compulsion, fled the country. In the years since, the details of the case have become more rather than less clear.
"It was not consensual sex by any means. I said no, repeatedly, but he wouldn't take no for an answer," Geimer said in 2003. She then went on to state that she didn't hold any grudges and hoped Polanski would win the Oscar for The Pianist.
BIOGRAPHERS HAVE OFTEN viewed Polanski's last quarter century as a period of decline and stagnation. Few major directors have produced a trilogy of films as uniformly wretched as Pirates (bad swashbuckling), Frantic (bad Hitchcock) and Bitter Moon (bad Hugh Grant). But his holocaust drama The Pianist, which did indeed win him the Academy Award for best director, has much to recommend it. Its flat beginning may suggest a BBC TV series, but the weird, virtually wordless final half-hour, in which Adrien Brody tiptoes about a ruined city, resonates very strongly indeed.
And Polanski seems to have finally established some stability in his personal life. In 1989 he married the actress Emmanuelle Seigner and the couple have two children. While many of his American contemporaries seem content to slip into dependency abuse, eccentric religions or wine production, Polanski continues to stubbornly refuse to look sat-upon or ridiculous.
So has he finally shaken off his ghastly past? Well, his latest film is an adaptation of Oliver Twist. Dickens's novel, you may recall, tells the story of a small parentless boy adrift in an unfriendly world. What was it that Tom Shields QC said?