Life in Technicolor, Part 2

International success: Polanski scored his first international success in 1962, shortly after he graduated from the Łódź Film School, which has educated several generations of Poland's finest filmmakers. That was the year that Knife in the Water won the FIPRESCI award at the Venice International Film Festival. At the same festival in 1993, Polanski received a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement. Polanski went to Hollywood in 1968 and made Rosemary's Baby, a film which has come to be regarded as a horror classic. But its success was overshadowed by a personal tragedy when the bodies of five people were found in Polanski's Bel Air villa in Los Angeles Aug. 10, 1969. Among the victims was 26-year-old American actress Sharon Tate, Polanski's second wife, who was eight months pregnant. Tate and four guests were massacred by the gang of Charles Manson, a self-proclaimed guru and one of the most infamous psychopaths of the 20th century. Polanski was in England when the tragedy happened. He quit working for two years. Then, in 1971, he directed The Tragedy of Macbeth, later considered the most bloody and brutal picture in his filmography. Tess and Chinatown: Ten years after the Bel Air massacre, Polanski put a dedication "to Sharon" in the end credits of Tess, an adaptation of the novel by Thomas Hardy with Nastassja Kinski in the title role. "As a director, he was ten times more wonderful than as a lover," Kinski, aged 20 at the time, told tabloids, adding Polanski had been sleeping with her for several years. Tess won three Academy Awards for best cinematography, set decorations and costume design. In the meantime, Polanski made Chinatown, one of the most successful films of his career. Set in 1930s Los Angeles and starring Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway, the film noir-style thriller got 11 Academy Award nominations. It was the last movie Polanski made in the United States. Many consider the film The Tenant from 1976 a milestone in Polanski's career, not only as a work of art, but also as a key to understanding the Polish director's personality. As well as directing the film, Polanski played the main role of Trelkovsky, a Polish immigrant who moves into a tenement house in Paris, renting an apartment previously inhabited by a woman who killed herself. As Trelkovsky, Polanski delivered a drastic image of loneliness and gradual collapse into insanity. Critics consider the role the best of Polanski as an actor, whether in cinema or theater, where he frequently appeared as well. The Tenant is also regarded, after Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby, as the third part of a triptych devoted to mental deviations that hit people who live in apartments in big cities, where anonymity and the absence of soulmates are a one-way ticket to madness. With Tess completed, Polanski went on a seven-year hiatus. Then he fulfilled what he described as a "boyhood dream" by making the adventure film Pirates in 1986. The movie got panned by critics and bombed at the box office. But success was just around the corner. In 1988, Polanski made a thriller titled Frantic. The cast included 22-year-old French actress Emmanuelle Seigner, who the following year became Polanski's third wife. Today the mother of his two children, Seigner has appeared in two other Polanski movies. She starred in 1992 with Hugh Grant in Bitter Moon, the story of a pathological and destructive love, and then she and Johnny Depp played in The Ninth Gate, an adaptation of the best-selling novel by Arturo Pérez-Reverte about the search for a mysterious book revealing the power of Satan. Between the two films, Polanski made a big-screen adaptation of Death and the Maiden, a Broadway play by Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman. The movie, which is a graphic study of the relationship between a victim and a torturer, starred Ben Kingsley and Sigourney Weaver. After The Pianist, Polanski filmed Oliver Twist, an adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic, but the movie was received tepidly. If Polanski is to be believed, The Ghost Writer may be his big comeback. But it is hard to tell whether Polanski will get to enjoy his success as a free man. His fighting spirit has not abandoned him, however, and Polanski says he will start working on a new script while he sits out his house arrest in Gstaad. Author: Witold Żygulski Source: The Warsaw Voice