The Road Goes On

The French-born Polish actor and director Roman Polanski survived one of the darkest events of the twentieth century, the Holocaust. At the age of 8, he was interned in a German concentration camp, where his mother died. He later attended the Polish Film School and, with his film noir Knife in the Water (1962), helped establish the reputation of Polish cinema abroad. Polanski's vision is of an unstable world of violence, sexual frustration, unconscious impulses, and destructive psychoses. Repulsion (1965), his first feature in the West, and the chilling Rosemary's Baby (1968), about satanic possession in New York City, marked him as a filmmaker who was unafraid to confront evil. He was forced to confront evil in his personal life once again when his wife, Sharon Tate, was brutally murdered in 1969 by the satanic Charles Manson cult in one of California's most sensational slayings. The horror of this experience informs his filmed version of Shakespeare's Macbeth (1972). Of his later films, Chinatown (1974), the story of a private investigator's discovery of twisted relationships in the wealthy family that has hired him, was well received, as was Tess (1981), Polanski's adaptation of Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles. 020