Roman Polanski

When Jack Nicholson was asked why he allowed his director to dictate his performance in Chinatown to an extent where colleagues half-expected the actual takes to be delivered in a Polish accent, Nicholson replied "because the little bastard's a genius". Despite doubts about Roman Polanski's methods, and his fixation on violence, voyeurism and humiliation, there was no denying the intensity with which he conveyed them on screen.

This intensity is inextricably linked to his life. Although born in Paris in 1933, he was living in Krakow when the Nazis invaded. His mother is said to have hurled her eight-year-old son from the train to Auschwitz, leaving him to eke out an almost feral existence. Post-war, he became an actor, discovering his vocation in 1954 when he appeared in Andrzej Wajda's A Generation and watched the great Polish director at work.

Polanski's film-school shorts revealed an unmistakable if disquieting talent, but one unlikely to find favour in Marxist Poland, so he used the success of Knife in the Water (1962) as a ticket to the West. In Britain, he made the now-classic Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-sac (1966) before scoring major hits with his two Hollywood films, Rosemary's Baby (1968), and Chinatown (1974).

But the 1970s were bookended by tragedy, when his wife and three friends were murdered by Charles Manson's gang in 1969, and when he was arrested for drugging and seducing a 13-year-old girl in 1977. Faced with the prospect of a lengthy prison sentence, he jumped bail and fled to Paris.

His films since then have been patchy, with only Tess (1979) and the flawed Bitter Moon (1992) matching his earlier work before The Pianist (2002) marked a watershed, being in part an evocation of his own traumatic childhood. Will the new Oliver Twist continue this trend?

Michael Brooke