Polanski was born in Paris in 1933, the son of Bula (née Katz-Przedborska) and Ryszard Polański, Polish painter and manufacturer of sculptures of Jewish background. Polanski's mother had been raised Roman Catholic and was of half-Jewish ancestry. The Polański family moved to Cracow in 1936 and was living there when World War II began with the German-Soviet invasion of Poland. The whole country …show more content…
His acting talent presaged a future in the film industry – but in front of the camera rather than behind it. He was discovered by Antoni Bohdziewicz, a prominent director who saw Polanski on stage for the first time in 1953. He offered him a role in the film Trzy opowieści (Three Stories). Soon afterwards, the future director played in Andrzej Wajda's big debut film – Pokolenie (Generation, 1954). The film marked the beginning of Polanski's path because it gave him the incentive to study filmmaking. Encouraged by Bohdziewicz, he decided to make his dream come true by going to the Łódź Film School. During his studies, Polanski met his first wife, Barbara Lass-Kwiatkowska, a promising star of the Polish cinema in those …show more content…
After a year’s battle in court – of the judge's abuse, Polanski recalled that “I was treated like a mouse that a huge bored cat simply plays with” – he fled the country hours before the official proclamation of the sentence, never to return there again. Since then, he has filmed mainly in his beloved France: Frantic, Tess, (the most expensive film made in France up to that time), Venus in Fur. However, his movies haven’t always had financial and critical success. Such was the case with Pirates, a 1986 ambitious Franco-Tunisian adventure comedy film, which was screened out of competition at the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. Moreover, the film's original estimated budget, while Polanski was aligned with Paramount on the picture, was 15 million dollars, but the final budget is estimated to have been over 40 million dollars. The reported gross box office revenues in the United States were only less than 2 million and 7 million dollars worldwide. Despite the film's financial disastrous failure, it was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Costume