Rajmund Roman Liebling net worth is $45 Million. Also know about Rajmund Roman Liebling bio, salary, height, age weight, relationship and more …

Rajmund Roman Liebling Wiki Biography

Rajmund Roman Thierry Polanski was born as on the 18th August 1933, in Paris, France, and is a French-Polish film director, actor, producer, and writer, best known for his films “Rosemary’s Baby” (1968), “Chinatown” (1974), and “The Pianist” (2002). Polanski is one of the most acclaimed directors of our time, and has won numerous awards including an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and three BAFTA Awards. Polanski’s career started in 1954.

Have you ever wondered how rich Roman Polanski is, as of mid- 2016? According to authoritative sources, it has been estimated that Roman Polanski’s net worth is as high as $45 million, an amount earned through his successful career in cinema. In addition to being highly-rated director and writer, Polanski has also worked as an actor and producer which improved his wealth.

Roman Polanski was born a son of Ryszard Polanski, a painter and manufacturer of sculptures, and Bula. His father was Jewish from Poland and mother half-Jewish from Russia. The family moved to Krakow from Paris in 1936 and stayed there during the WWII. Polanski managed to escape and find shelter with Polish Roman-Catholic family, while his father was sent to concentration camp Mauthausen in Austria, and his mother to Auschwitz where she died.

Roman developed an interest in the cinema from an early age and often went to see movies with his parents before the war started. He later went to the National Film School in Łódź and began his acting career in Andrzej Wajda’s movie “Pokolenie (A Generation)” in 1955. He later acted in such films as “Zaczarowany rower” (1955), “Wraki” (1957), “Koniec nocy” (1957), “Speed” (1959), ‘Do widzenia, do jutra…” (1960), ‘Innocent Sorcerers” (1960), and “Samson” (1961).

Polanski had his debut as a writer and director in 1955, but these were mainly short films. However, in 1962, his first feature film “Knife in the Water” saw the light, and was immediately noticed in Hollywood, winning an Oscar for Best Foreign Movie. It was also nominated for a BAFTA and won the FIPRESCI Prize at Venice Film Festival. The movie was Polanski’s breakthrough, and he would later make several classics. He spent more time directing and writing, but also had some acting roles, usually in his own movies.

In 1965, Polanski wrote and directed “Repulsion” starring Catherine Deneuve, Ian Hendry, and John Fraser. The “Cul-De-Sac” (1966) with Donald Pleasence, Françoise Dorléac, and Lionel Stander was his next film, and later he directed, wrote, and starred in “The Fearless Vampire Killers” (1967). In 1968, Polanski wrote and directed the masterpiece “Rosemary’s Baby” starring Mia Farrow, John Cassavetes, and Ruth Gordon, which won an Oscar and Golden Globe, and significantly improved Polanski’s net worth as well as reputation.

In the ’70’s, Polanski filmed “Macbeth” (1971) with Jon Finch, Francesca Annis, and Martin Shaw, and the blockbuster “Chinatown” (1974) starring Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and John Huston, which was Polanski’s highest-rated to date, and won an Oscar with ten more nominations, won five Golden Globes, and three BAFTA’s. He later continued with “The Tenant” (1976) in which he starred with Isabelle Adjani and Melvyn Douglas, and “Tesa” (1979) starring Nastassja Kinski, Peter Firth, and Leigh Lawson, which won three Oscars, two Golden Globes, and a BAFTA.

Polanski had problems with authorities concerning an alleged sexual assault of 13-year-old Samantha Gailey in 1977, and since 50 years in prison was the sentence that waited him, he decided to get out of USA and go to London and later France, where he currently resides. Since he’s France’s citizen, he cannot be extradited, but during the 80’s and 90’s he made fewer movies than usual. However, he filmed “Pirates” (1986), “Frantic” (1989) starring Harrison Ford, “Bitter Moon” (1992) with Hugh Grant, “Death and the Maiden” (1994) starring Sigourney Weaver, Ben Kingsley, and Stuart Wilson, and “The Ninth Gate” (1999) with Johnny Depp, Frank Langella, and Lena Olin, all adding to his net worth..

These movies weren’t very successful, but Polanski managed to get back into the stars with his film “The Pianist” (2002) starring Adrien Brody, which won three Oscars including for Best Director, but Polanski couldn’t receive his only Academy Award, being a fugitive from US justice; Harrison Ford took it on his behalf. It also additionally improved his net worth.

Polanski later directed “Oliver Twist” (2005), “The Ghost Writer” (2010) starring Ewan McGregor, Pierce Brosnan, and Olivia Williams, “Carnage” (2011) with Jodie Foster, Kate Winslet, and Christoph Waltz, and “Venus in Fur” (2013) starring Emmanuelle Seigner and Mathieu Amalric. Most recently, Polanski is filming a drama called “Based on a True Story” that will come out in 2018.

Regarding his personal life, Roman Polanski was married to Barbara Kwiatkowska-Lass from 1959 to 1962. His second wife was the late Sharon Tate from 1968 to her death in 1969, when members of Charles Manson’s “family” broke into her home and stabbed her to death. Polanski’s third wife is Emmanuelle Seigner, since 1989.

IMDB Wikipedia ‘Do widzenia “A Day at the Beach” (1970) “A Taste for Women” (1964) “Carnage” (2007) “Roman by Polanski” (1985) “Koniec nocy” (1957) “Wraki” (1957) “Zaczarowany rower” (1955) $45 Million 1933 1933-8-18 5′ 3″ (1.6 m) Academy Awards Academy Awards for Best Picture Actor Adrien Brody and John Fraser Andrzej Wajda Annette Polanski Argentine Film Critics Association – Best Foreign Film August 18 Barbara Kwiatkowska-Lass Ben Kingsley Berlin Film Festival Awards British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) for Best Direction Bula Liebling Catherine Deneuve César Awards for Best Picture Chinatown (1974) Christoph Waltz Director do jutra…” (1960) Donald Pleasence Elvis Polanski Emmanuelle Seigner European Film Awards Ewan McGregor Faye Dunaway Film director for best Director France Francesca Annis Françoise Dorléac Frank Langella French Golden Globe Award for Best Director Harrison Ford Ian Hendry Innocent Sorcerers (1960) Isabelle Adjani Jack Nicholson Jodie Foster John Cassavetes John Huston Johnny Depp Jon Finch Kate Winslet Leigh Lawson Lena Olin Leo Lionel Stander Martin Shaw Mathieu Amalric Melvyn Douglas Mia Farrow Morgane Polanski Nastassja Kinski National Film School in ?ód? National Film School in Łódź New York Film Critics Circle Awards Oliver Twist (2005) Olivia Williams Paris Peter Firth Pierce Brosnan Polish Rajmund Roman Liebling Roman Polanski Net Worth Rosemary’s Baby (1968) Ruth Gordon Ryszard Liebling Samson (1961) Sharon Tate Sigourney Weaver Speed (1959) Stuart Wilson The Ghost Writer (2010) The Pianist (2002) Venice Film Festival awards Writer Zürich Film Festival Golden Icon Award

Rajmund Roman Liebling Quick Info

Rajmund Roman Liebling Trademarks

1. Often key scenes or plot are featured near or associated with water.
2. By the end of his films, the protagonist often meets an uncertain, melancholic future (“The Ninth Gate (1999) “, “The Ghost Writer (2010)”, “Rosemary’s Baby (1968)”, “Chinatown (1974)” and “Macbeth (1971)”).
3. Likes to arrange shots from the protagonist’s perspective and slowly pan around the room to points of interest as the character notices them.

Rajmund Roman Liebling Quotes

• [2007 interview] I think my best work is The Pianist (2002). I think if I were asked what cans of which movies do I want deposited on my tomb, I would say The Pianist. But next probably is Chinatown (1974).
• [2000 interview] I don’t think I made my movie yet. I don’t have one that would give me a real satisfaction. I would not put any one of them on my gravestone.
• [on Carnage (2011)] With each film, I need an artistic challenge so I don’t get bored! I like to tackle challenges. On this film, it was telling a story that takes place in real time and in a confined space. I’ve made films before in an enclosed space, but not as rigorously self-contained, so this was a new experience. When I was a teenager, I was really struck by Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet (1948), with its strange castle full of stairs, terraces and corridors, and also by Carol Reed’s fabulous Odd Man Out (1947) with James Mason. It’s a film with such a strong impact that I often tried to imitate it later. In fact, my first film, Knife in the Water (1962) was filmed on a boat with three people. So I wasn’t afraid of the constraints of a confined space like an apartment. I find it really exciting, in fact, even if it isn’t easy. Because there were no ellipses, you couldn’t put something in a different place from one shot to another. If someone put a glass on the table it had to be there throughout the picture unless we see it being moved in the action.
• [on attracting an audience] One can create the most marvellous things, but if they are not accepted, it’s a tragedy. It’s like Van Gogh, who sold only one painting, and in fact to his brother, I believe. This great painter, who is my absolute favourite, lived his life for us, not for himself. I don’t have this ambition; I would like to share my view of the world with others.
• [2014] I never really imagined how one can retire. What do you do? Gardening? No, I feel really happy when I’m working. I think the best moments in my life are when I work. It was my passion when I was a young man, and it remains my passion. I feel probably the way a carpenter feels when he’s making a beautiful chair and seeing the result of his work. The work itself is satisfying, the process of getting the result.
• [on Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby (1968)] I had only seen her on the cover of Life. To be honest, I was not enthusiastic about her until we started to work. Then I discovered, somewhat to my surprise, that she is a brilliant actress. This is one of the most difficult woman’s parts I can imagine.
• To me, Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is not an entirely serious movie – it can be interpreted two ways. I shot it in such a way that you could consider her as a person with problems and imagining it all. I made it more ambiguous than the book and that’s why I never showed the baby.
• [on working with John Travolta on aborted film The Double] There were changes in the script, but they were not that dramatic. The problem was that Travolta resented any kind of comment. He seemed to have some kind of inferiority complex, perhaps from some period of his life when he was not justly dealt with. During the third read-through, about a week before we were supposed to start shooting, there was a heated conversation between us. I made some comment about his line-readings in a scene – I said something like, “That’s not how I heard it in my mind” – and he said, “Well, that’s how I heard it.” I said, “Well, there may be as many ideas of how this scene should be dealt with as there are people in the world. Who takes the final decision? I’m here to direct.” And we started arguing. It was not a fight but it was quite uneasy, as when people don’t say exactly what’s on their mind. He is more a passive-aggressive person, he does not come right out and say, “You asshole!” Maybe in the readings I should have just sat there and listened without reacting, just to get him acclimatised. But from what I had seen of him, I thought he was a real pro, and with pros, you know, you work without thinking of all this sensitivity. You just give direction and sometimes you show what you want that’s different. I’ve never known any instance of an actor walking out like this so close to filming. The fact is, if you are an actor and people depend on you, you cannot just bolt like that.
• [interview from 1976] Attention to detail is something that I have been always very fond of, even when I was doing my first little films at the film school, and even before then when I used to go the cinema, the films that really interested me as the viewer were the ones which had tremendous attention to detail. I think that detail creates atmosphere; and now when I go the cinema sometimes a little detail which is wrong can throw me completely off. When I see a film, let’s say, which happens in the 30s and suddenly I see men with long hair – that spoils the film for me completely because I know that people didn’t wear this type of hairdo until only 10 or 15 years ago. It’s a question of honesty, of not only the film director but any other artist or writer, this attention to detail. In literature, when the writer knows the subject he is writing about, it becomes twice as interesting.
• [on Pirates (1986)] To make a costume picture on a sound stage is bad enough. To do it on the deck of a galleon is terrible. I thought of building part of a boat, and also using models and interior sets. Then we decided it was easier to just build the whole boat. The boat is the set. Fine, except that it must also float, and the sails had to be unfurled, and taken up and down, and behind us was the canopy of sky, which would be blue in one shot and cloudy in the next. The wind comes from nowhere and first you see the town in the background, then the sand, then the sea. Nothing matches between one shot and the next. And then you have to think about the beards, and the swords, and the wigs! The wigs and the wigs, and Walter Matthau’s wooden leg. And if there was to be an explosion, then you think about the beards and the wigs and the leg and the explosion and the wind and the sky, and it drives you crazy. Each shot was like tearing a fish out of a shark’s mouth. It is easy to be perfect when no one disturbs you. On the sound stage, you control everything. So you can be patient. On a boat, however, providence may have other plans for you. It was a nightmare from beginning to end. Every day something new would go wrong. I should have got a special award just for finishing it.
• I’m happy when I find a subject that excites me, that gives me a reason to make a film; and I’m still happy when I’m making it because this is my real and true profession.
• The first time that I felt that I really had got it technically smooth was Rosemary’s Baby (1968). The first time I made a film that would make me happy because I felt the humour and the tone the way I like it was The Fearless Vampire Killers: Vampires 101 (1967). Chinatown (1974) was the first film where I had no struggle throughout the production because I was totally supported by the producer and had everything at my disposal; I was like a racing driver with a bunch of people standing around you and just ready to respond to every gesture.
• Never pull a hair from Faye Dunaway’s head. Pull it from somebody else’s head.
• Films are films, life is life.
• [on Bitter Moon (1992)] The fact that sexual attraction wanes, that’s what fascinated me. That has nothing to do with love, which can actually deepen as sex declines. The premise of the film is that love cannot last forever in its true intensity. It must bleed or end tragically. If it has peaks, it must have lows. I hadn’t done a movie like this for a long time, and I felt strongly not only that I’d like to do it, but that people who know my work were somehow expecting me to return to this kind of material. I wasn’t making it to shock. Maybe I had a little bit of this desire when I was young. I don’t have any of those needs now, and even when I was beginning, the main thing for me was to tell the story and if the story required violent images or nudity, I would use them for telling it. I didn’t have much money, so we worked hard and were under tremendous pressure, but I did what I wanted and nobody interfered with the result.
• [on Weekend of a Champion (1972)] The reason I made the film was first because I wanted to make a film about a friend, about Jackie Stewart specifically, and two because I like Formula 1 very much and I thought it was a very cinematic, very visual kind of sport. And it was not really being filmed that much because there was no television every week where you could watch the Formula 1 races. I never considered myself talented in this direction. I didn’t consider myself a director of documentaries particularly in that period. Documentaries were not as frequently successful as they are now – there are many more of them now because of the television. You see many more documentaries in theaters. In those times it was very, very seldom that you could hope to have any kind of success with a documentary in a general theatrical release.
• [advice to aspiring filmmakers] It’s a question of patience and perseverance. You can’t teach talent, but you can tell someone how to sustain the adversity which is an enemy constantly on set. Whatever type of film you make, it requires a crew, it requires financing, it requires a lot of people around you. And those people – even if they are all with you, even if they are all friendly, and even if they agree with the final result – they still have their personal agendas. They see things differently than you do.. They have families and children and girlfriends and they’re horny. So what you really need is to be patient and to be able to stand all those problems.
• [on Frantic (1988)] The idea was to make a film about the things I know – to show my Paris. I wanted to get rid of everything that was too obviously quaintly Parisian and tried to show the town of today. It was the way I see it and not as Americans might imagine it to be. Having as a theme an American in Paris, I wanted to dispel the idea and tradition of Irma la Douce (1963) and Moulin Rouge (1952) which still perseveres, and I wanted to create a new idea of an American here.
• There are differences between making films in the US and Europe; in America the opportunities are grander but the films are more formulaic and less artistic.
• The world isn’t getting any better, which is quite alienating. Scientific progress seems to amplify rather than lessen our problems. Inventions proliferate, the economy booms, but people suffer ever more. I think there are simply too many people. Progress can’t keep up with the growing population, although we like to believe otherwise. [1999]
• Evil and the Devil are two different things. The Devil is how humans like to imagine evil, with horns and a tail. Evil is part of our personality. I’ve never believed in occultism or the Devil, and I’m not at all religious. I’d rather read science books than something about occultism. When it comes to cinema, evil is simply a form of entertainment to me.
• The Ninth Gate (1999) is fun, it’s nice, I think it’s a good movie, but after all, what is it about? It’s like every other movie that is made nowadays. It may be different in style, but it doesn’t make any important statement. It was something that could be done quickly, I needed work, I had to do something. It was too long a time since my last film and a lot of projects were canceled.
• The older I get, the harder I find it to decide what I should do next. As a young man I was much more innocent. Life seemed endless and I simply said, “Okay: I’m doing this film. Period.” Time has taught me that I have to assume all the responsibilities when I embark on one of these adventures, and today I ask myself, “Do I really have the perseverance? Can I handle everything getting on my nerves?” Making films is a battle and sometimes you get tired of fighting. I simply want to produce good work, and that’s why I have to think I’m the best. Of course this isn’t easy because it’s not necessarily true. But you won’t win if you think you’re a loser.
• [on aborted film The Double with John Travolta] So many people had put so much effort into that project when all of a sudden everything fell apart. Pierre Guffroy, my longtime production designer, cried when we tore down the set. Travolta claimed I’d changed the script without him agreeing. Besides the fact that it was within my rights to do so, the whole thing was a joke. On the other hand, looking back, it was probably a good thing in the end because of all the special effects needed. It required a lot of patience and I don’t think Travolta would have been up to it. Stars are an audience attraction, though that doesn’t make their wages any less obscene. How can Travolta – who gets $20 million – risk such silly behaviour? But there are plenty of counterexamples, like Sigourney Weaver who asked for a third of her usual fee for Death and the Maiden (1994) and Johnny Depp who was very disciplined when we made The Ninth Gate (1999).
• [on casting Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby (1968)] She has a neurotic quality, good for Rosemary. Only nuts are interesting people.
• It’s getting more and more difficult to make an ambitious and original film. There are less and less independent producers or independent companies and an increasing number of corporations who are more interested in balance sheets than in artistic achievement. They want to make a killing each time they produce a film. They’re only interested in the lowest common denominator because they’re trying to reach the widest audience. And you get some kind of entropy. That’s the danger; they look more alike, those films. The style is all melting and it all looks the same. Even young directors – for most of them their only standard of achievement is how well their films do on the first weekend or whatever. It worries me. But then, from time to time, you have a film like The Usual Suspects (1995) or Pulp Fiction (1994), which I enjoyed very much. Whenever you do something new or original, people run to see it because it’s different. Then, if it happens to be successful, the studios rush to imitate it. It becomes commonplace right away. But it’s been like that before, I think. Now, the stakes are so gigantic that they cut each other’s throats. So if most of the films are failures, then those that succeed so spectacularly, so commercially, become the norm. It’s like a roulette for the studios. The problem with it is that it becomes more and more of a committee. Before, you dealt with the studio. It had one or two persons and now you have masses of executives who have to justify their existence and write so-called “creative notes” and have creative meetings. They obsess about the word creative probably because they aren’t.
• You make films for people, so you enjoy it when it’s a success. Who wants an empty theatre? But you can’t think of that when you’re doing it because you have to satisfy your own artistic taste, and not trying to extrapolate it, asking whether they’re going to like it or not, because it doesn’t work this way, unfortunately.
• [on Faye Dunaway] She was a gigantic pain in the ass. She demonstrated certifiable proof of insanity.
• [on Harrison Ford] Often when Harrison read a line, it was a different reading than I anticipated, but it worked. Somehow, it was more inspiring or original than what I had in mind.
• [on Jack Nicholson] Jack! You see how angry he gets in a scene? Unbelievably scary! He can not stop, he goes into a kind of it, you dunno whether he is acting any more!
• First comes my love of my work [in movies], but secondary to the creation itself is the need to get laid.
• A lot has changed for me. My life has improved. It’s not only children, but the relationship with my wife is the best thing that ever happened to me.
• I am not a fortune teller. I would like to be judged for my work, and not for my life. If there is any possibility of changing your destiny, it may be only in your creative life, certainly not in your life, period.
• [on Oliver Twist (2005)] I would never think of doing a movie for children if I did not have any. A lot of things in the film I know about. I relate to all the sufferings much more now that I have kids. I see it from the outside now. And before, I didn’t. Children have this capacity for resistance, and they accept things as they are, maybe because they have no other reference. They are somehow more flexible; they adapt much faster than adults. My children like coming to the set of my movies, they know what I am doing, they live around all that, but the result of all this work is something so remote from their world they can’t identify with it. I wanted something they could, so I started looking for subjects that would be suitable. It’s for them, so they will be able to remember the movie years from now when I won’t be around.
• Hollywood is like that: a spoiled brat that screams for possession of a toy and then tosses it out of the baby buggy.
• [To the press after the murder of his wife Sharon Tate in 1969] …All of you know how beautiful she was, but few of you know how good she was.
• Every film I make represents a departure for me. You see, it takes so long to make a film. By the time you get to the next one you’re already a different man. You’ve grown up by one or two years.
• Every failure made me more confident. Because I wanted even more to achieve as revenge. To show that I could.
• [on François Truffaut, Claude Lelouch, and Jean-Luc Godard] People like Truffaut, Lelouch and Godard are like little kids playing at being revolutionaries. I’ve passed through this stage. I lived in a country where these things happened seriously.
• In Paris, one is always reminded of being a foreigner. If you park your car wrong, it is not the fact that it’s on the sidewalk that matters, but the fact that you speak with an accent.
• If ever I see one of my films on television, I have a hard time sitting through it, because it seems like all the sins of youth. Truly, I don’t think I did my picture yet. I don’t feel like I did anything that was totally satisfying to me.
• Cinema should make you forget you are sitting in a theater.
• Whenever I get happy, I always have a terrible feeling.
• I can only say that whatever my life and work have been, I’m not envious of anyone, and this is my biggest satisfaction.
• The best films are because of nobody but the director.
• [on his style of filmmaking] “I don’t really know what is shocking. When you tell the story of a man who is beheaded, you have to show how they cut off his head. If you don’t, it’s like telling a dirty joke and leaving out the punch line.”
• [on filmmaking] “You have to show violence the way it is. If you don’t show it realistically, then that’s immoral and harmful. If you don’t upset people, then that’s obscenity.”
• My films are the expression of momentary desires. I follow my instincts, but in a disciplined way.
• Normal love isn’t interesting. I assure you that it’s incredibly boring.

Rajmund Roman Liebling Important Facts

• Six of Roman Polanski’s films–Knife in the Water (1962), Repulsion (1965), Cul-De-Sac (1966), Rosemary’s Baby (1968), Macbeth (1971), and Tess (1979)–are in the Criterion Collection.
• His favourite films include: Odd Man Out (1947), Hamlet (1948), Citizen Kane (1941) and 8½ (1963).
• In September 2011, Polanski returned to Zurich, Switzerland–the city where he was arrested in 2009–to finally accept the Zurich Film Festival award for life achievement.
• Friends with: Harrison Ford, Krzysztof Komeda, Martin Scorsese, Voytek Frykowski, Jack Nicholson, Gene Gutowski, Woody Allen, Hugh M. Hefner, Brett Ratner, Robert De Niro, Warren Beatty, John Phillips, Jackie Stewart, Robert Evans, Steve McQueen, Roger Vadim, Andrew Braunsberg, Jerzy Kosinski, Bruce Lee, Andrzej Wajda, Jay Sebring, Peter Sellers, Adam Holender and Gilbert Taylor.
• In 1969, he was writing a script for a film about the Donner Party, as well as a biography of Italian violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini, but both projects were abandoned.
• In February 2007 it was announced that Polanski would direct a $130m adaptation of Robert Harris’ novel Pompeii. Orlando Bloom and Scarlett Johansson were rumoured to be starring, but in September 2007 he left the project due to concerns over the threatened Screen Actors Guild strike.
• Directed four actors in Oscar-nominated performances: Ruth Gordon, Jack Nicholson, Faye Dunaway, and Adrien Brody. Gordon and Brody did win Oscars for their performances in two of his films.
• In November 1989, Polanski was approached by Warner Bros. to adapt and direct Mikhail A. Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita. The project was subsequently dropped by Warner Bros. due to budgetary concerns and the studio’s belief that the subject matter was no longer relevant due to the fall of the Berlin Wall. Polanski has described his script as the best he has ever adapted.
• Was offered the chance to direct King Kong (1976) but turned it down.
• According to his autobiography, producer Robert Evans initially wanted Polanski to direct Sliver (1993). But since Polanski could not return to the U.S., Evans planned on having a second unit director shoot some footage in New York, while Polanski would direct the rest of the film in Paris.
• He was to have directed The Double, a modern-day, comedic adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel about a man whose life is taken over by his doppelganger. John Travolta, who was being paid $17 million, was to have played the lead, alongside Isabelle Adjani, John Goodman, and Jean Reno. Shooting was to have begun in Paris in June 1996. Lili Fini Zanuck and Todd Black were producing, Jeremy Leven had written the screenplay, and other personnel such as director of photography Robert Richardson and production designer Pierre Guffroy were in place. Just nine days before the commencement of principal photography, and with around $15 million already spent on the project, Travolta flew back to the U.S. following an argument with Polanski. Travolta claimed that the shooting screenplay had been significantly altered from the one he had originally read. Following Travolta’s departure, Steve Martin was quickly hired to replace him, but Isabelle Adjani said she was only prepared to work with Travolta, and she, too, left the film. The project collapsed shortly afterwards.
• Born in Paris, France, he was the son of Bula (née Katz-Przedborska) and Ryszard Liebling (aka Ryszard Polanski), a painter and plastics manufacturer. His father was a Polish Jew and his mother, a native of Russia, had a Jewish father and a Roman Catholic mother, and was raised as a Catholic.
• Is portrayed by Marek Probosz in Helter Skelter (2004).
• President of the jury at the Cannes Film Festival in 1991.
• When he fled from the U.S. in the late 70s, much was made about the director’s inability to ever make films in the States again. However, Polanski only shot 2 films in the States prior to his arrest: Rosemary’s Baby (1968) and Chinatown (1974) were shot in North America. All other English-language films before the arrest were shot in the UK, and all the ones since have been shot in Central Europe.
• Was one of the judges in the Miss Universe pageant in 1976.
• Was voted the 26th Greatest Director of all time by Entertainment Weekly.
• Within the Hollywood industry in the late ’60s and early ’70s he was often mocked as the stereotypical short, tyrannical European director.
• Won the Best Director Oscar in 2003 for The Pianist (2002) at the age of 69 years and 7 months, making him, at that time, the oldest person to win the award. Polanski eclipsed the record previously held by George Cukor, who was 65 when he won Best Director for My Fair Lady (1964). This record was beaten in 2005, when Clint Eastwood won Best Director for Million Dollar Baby (2004) at the age of 74.
• Received his first best director Oscar for the movie The Pianist (2002) five months after the awards ceremony. His friend, Harrison Ford, flew to France to present Polanski the award, since the director would be immediately arrested and incarcerated due to outstanding warrants stemming from his fleeing the US to avoid further imprisonment after his 1978 statutory rape conviction. [8 September 2003].
• Roman and his father are Holocaust survivors. His father was Jewish, and his half-Jewish mother (who was murdered in Auschwitz) had been raised as a Roman Catholic.
• Shortly before her murder, wife Sharon Tate gave Polanski a copy of Thomas Hardy’s 1891 novel “Tess of the d’Urbervilles”, and he planned to film it with her. When he finally made the movie Tess (1979), he dedicated it to her.
• Two children with Emmanuelle Seigner: Morgane Polanski (born January 20, 1993) and Elvis Polanski (born April 12, 1998).
• In 1969, while Polanski was out of town on business, his wife, actress Sharon Tate, was brutally murdered by members of Charles Manson’s cult family, though Manson only ordered the killing and was not present during the murders. Tate was eight months pregnant with Polanski’s first child at the time. Polanski has said that his life’s biggest regret was not being present at the house the night his wife and four others were murdered.
• After Polanski fled American justice, the judge over his case swore to put him behind bars again. Though the judge died in 1989, the director still cannot return to the U.S. as he would be arrested immediately.
• Convicted of the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl after plea bargaining, Polanski served time in prison in California, but prison officials released him sooner than the judge’s original sentence had intended. The judge then sought to have Polanski brought to court again for further sentencing. Rather than do so, Polanski fled to Europe to avoid and escape a second arrest and incarceration. In 2013, his former victim, Samantha Geimer–who was 50 years old and had long ago forgiven him for the crime–detailed her story in a book called “The Girl”.
• Has not returned to the United States since 1978.

Rajmund Roman Liebling Filmography

Rajmund Roman Liebling Awards