Roman Polanski Net Worth

How much is Roman Polanski worth?

About Roman Polanski

Roman Polanski is undoubtedly one of the greatest directors of New Hollywood, a certified genius, however he is also one of the most reviled. After scraping his way by living hand-to-mouth in the Krakow ghetto during the Holocaust and later suffered the tragedy of his pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, being murdered by Charles Manson’s followers things got even worse. Though he earned sympathy for these atrocities, it all turned on Polanski after his conviction for the statutory rape of a 13-year-old girl, Samantha Geimer. This led to Polanski’s flight from the FBI and taking up permanent residence in France as a fugitive of the United States.

Despite his criminal status, Polanski continued making films with some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, and even won the Academy Award for Best Director in 2002. Regardless of his stature today, Polanski is a known genius director who’s own personal life is perhaps even more incredible than any one of his films.

He was born in 1933, Paris, France and moved with his family to his father’s native Poland when he was three years old. When he was six, the Nazis invaded and his world would change forever.

Polanski’s Jewish family was divided by the Holocaust. While he made good around the Krakow ghetto smuggling food and luxuries to survive, his mother, Bula, was sent to Auschwitz, allegedly to the gas chamber four months pregnant. His father, Ryszard, barely survived Mauthausen-Gusen, a Nazi concentration camp on a hill above the market town of Mauthausen, in Upper Austria.

Polanski eventually fled Krakow and survived until the end of the war. He was finally reunited with his father and other members of his extended family but the war left a permanent mark on him and it would be something that he would think about almost daily for the next decades of his life. While Poland struggled to rebuild under Soviet rule, Polanski found that he had a talent for film.

After acting on stage and working on a radio show, Polanski earned his way into the Lodz Film School, where he made numerous shorts over the course of his five years of study. His most prominent was Two Men and a Wardrobe, which earned several international awards and garnered his first significant attention.

Directed Genius

In 1962, Polanski directed his first feature, Knife in the Water, a dark psychological drama about a love triangle between a married couple and a young hitchhiker that ends in tragedy.

Its success on the international film festival circuit led him to England, where he made his first English-language film, Repulsion, which centered on a young woman (Catherine Deneuve) whose simultaneous attraction to and repulsion to sex leads to mental disintegration and eventually murder.

After directing the dark comedy Cul-de-Sac, he made the horror spoof The Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me But Your Teeth Are in My Neck, which introduced him to American actress Sharon Tate.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Following Fearless Vampire Killers, Polanski and Tate married in 1968. That year, he made his Hollywood debut with the classic horror movie, Rosemary’s Baby, which starred a waifish Mia Farrow as the birth mother of the spawn of Satan. The film was a smash with audiences and critics, and earned Polanski an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.

It was at the end of 1968 that Tate became pregnant with the couple’s first child and fatefully moved into a Benedict Canyon house in the Hollywood Hills once occupied by actress Candice Bergen. The house would soon be the site of one of Hollywood’s most notorious murders.

The Murder of Sharon Tate

It was Aug. 9, 1969, Polanski was away in London preparing his next film, Sharon Tate and house guests Jay Sebring, Wojciech Frykowski, and coffee heiress Abigail Folger, were enjoying time together at the house. Following a home invasion they were brutally stabbed, shot and hanged by members of Charles Manson’s cult.

Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Charles “Tex” Watson and Linda Kasabian were ordered by Manson to kill everyone inside the home. They shot and killed young Steven Parent, a friend of the home’s caretaker, William Garretson, as he was leaving the premises.

Inside the home, Manson’s family gathered everyone in the living room and proceeded to stab and shoot Sebring, who was trying to protect Tate – then eight-and-a-half months pregnant.

Both Folger and Frykowski managed to escape the house, but were hunted down and killed outside on the lawn. Atkins, stabbed Tate 16 times, including several punctures to her womb.

A devastated Polanski waited months for police to find the killers while enduring persistent questions probing for a possible motive that he may have had. It wasn’t until Atkins herself was arrested for car theft and bragged in prison about the murders that the assailants were finally found out.

In 2019, Quentin Tarantino released Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood. A movie starring Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio which was loosely based on the Sharon Tate story yet with a very different outcome, à la Tarantino.

Polanski later moved back to Europe following Tate’s death and made his next film, a bloody rendition of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, that was seen as a cathartic release from the tragedy.

After 1973’s Diary of Forbidden Dreams, Polanski directed one of the greatest films of all time and certainly considered the best of that era – Chinatown, a neo-noir mystery that starred Jack Nicholson is set in 1937 in Los Angeles. It follows the story of private investigator Jake ‘J.J.’ Gittes who is hired by a woman to investigate whether her husband is having an affair. The husband, Hollis Mulwray, is the chief water engineer for the city of Los Angeles. Soon after Gittes delivers the photos that seem to confirm her suspicions, he meets the man’s real wife and, intrigued, investigates further. Then Hollis Mulwray turns up dead.

Ending with the famous line, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown,” the film earned an incredible 11 Academy Award nominations, but only took home the statue for Best Screenplay, written by Robert Towne. Polanski himself appeared in the film as a thug. His cameo appearance is credited as ‘Man with Knife’ and his character cuts cuts Gittes’ nose after catching him snooping near a water pipe.

From Filmmaker to Fugitive

Despite monumental success in America, in early 1977, things took a turn. Polanski was hired by the French edition of Vogue magazine to take photos of several girls, one of whom turned out to be the 13-year-old Samantha Geimer. Allegedly, Polanski managed to convince Geimer to photograph her without wearing a top and sent her home shaken by the experience.

Weeks later, Polanski, again allegedly, brought her to Jack Nicholson’s home on Mulholland Drive. Nicholson was away in Colorado at the time. Polanski was eventually accused of giving her champagne and, possibly, Quaaludes. According to Geimer, Polanski convinced her to fully undress in a hot tub, where he took photos and sexually assaulted her.

He was arrested the following night and later was indicted on six charges; rape by use of drugs, perversion, sodomy, lewd and lascivious act upon a child under 14, and furnishing a controlled substance to a minor. At the time, Polanski claimed that the sex had been consensual and that Geimer’s mother was engaged in a blackmail scheme.

Polanksi eventually entered a plea bargain where he claimed guilt to statutory rape. He was sentenced to 90 days of psychiatric evaluation and served 42. However tensions began to rise and shaken himself by what appeared to be a re-sentencing for a longer prison term, Polanski fled the United States and took up residence in France, where he held citizenship.

Polanski lived in France for decades. France is a country that does not extradite its citizens and there he continued to make films. However, in 2009, he was arrested while on his way to receive a lifetime achievement award in Switzerland, but again managed to avoid being sent back for retrial in the United States.

Making Films as a Wanted Man

Polanski made a number of quality films while remaining a fugitive of America, earning both adoration for his talent as a director and revulsion as the claimed perpetrator of such devious crimes. Roman Polanski is a polarizing figure clearly. While I think many would like to be able to forgive this man for crimes that may or may not have taken place as claimed and so many decades ago, still more seem to consider him having eluded justice by escaping and living in Paris.

In any case professionally, in 1979, his film Tess starring Nastassja Kinski, earned three Academy Awards, but he then stumbled in the 1980s with Pirates and Frantic. At the time he made Tess, there are rumors that the then 43-year-old had an affair with Kinski, who was anywhere between 15 and 17. However the facts are unsubstantiated and Kinski says that, “there was a flirtation. There could have been a seduction, but there was not. He had respect for me.”

Polanski was later approached by Steven Spielberg during the latter’s making of Schindler’s List with an offer to direct, but he turned down the job citing the memories as too painful.

Spielberg’s film did relate a number of incidents suffered by Polanski and his family during the Holocaust, most notably the famed Girl in the Red Coat, who was based on one of his cousins. Unlike the girl in the movie, Polanski’s cousin survived the war. It would take almost another decade before Polanski dealt directly with the horror Jews suffered during World War II. In 2002, he released The Pianist, a somewhat fictionalized account of Polish pianist and composer, Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody), and his struggle to survive the Holocaust.

The Pianist was Polanski’s greatest artistic triumph since Chinatown, and earned him the Oscar for Best Director, though he was of course not on hand at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood to receive his award.

Summing-Up

Love him or hate him, Roman Polanski was a consummate artist who directed a number of quality films. For many critics, Chinatown was one of the greatest movies of the latter 20th century.

His life was beset by three great tragedies – the last of his own doing – which have evoked sorrow, sympathy and rage. These seminal moments have in one way or another enriched his work, often for the better. And even today, Roman Polanski continues to direct films of the highest caliber, most recently An Officer and a Spy (2019). As of 2023, Roman Polanski’s net worth is estimated to be $60 million dollars.

While he may go down in history as a wanted criminal who avoided doing his time, Polanski’s contributions to cinema should not be dismissed. In fact, it behooves us to separate the man from the artist, if only to give the great films he made, The Pianist, Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, and many more besides, their proper due.