Roman Polanski

Born: August 18 1933
Where: Paris, France

A child survivor of the Holocaust, Polanski's wife was murdered by the Charles Manson cult and he has spent most of his life out of his adopted American homeland due to child sex allegations.

As an eight-year-old, the Paris-born Polanski's parents were taken to Auschwitz concentration camp, where his pregnant mother was gassed shortly after arrival.

Roman only avoided capture when his father pushed him through a gap in a wall as the Nazis approached (they were reunited at the end of the war).

Growing up in war-torn Poland, the young Polanski found solace in trips to the cinema and acting in radio dramas, on stage and in films.

In 1954, while at the Lodz Film School, one of his student films, Two Men and a Wardrobe, won five international awards.

In 1962, Polanski directed his first feature-length film, Knife in the Water. It was poorly received by state officials but became a sensation in the West, where it won the Critics' Prize at the Venice Film Festival as well as an Academy Award nomination for Best Foreign Film.

He moved to England to make his next three films and found a bride in the form of his Dance of the Vampires co-star, American Sharon Tate.

They married in 1968, and it wasn't long before Polanski made his American film debut with Rosemary's Baby.

But his new-found success was dealt a shattering blow - the eight-months pregnant Tate and three of Polanski's friends were murdered by members of the Charles Manson cult.

Macbeth was a brutally realistic adaptation of the violent Shakespeare tragedy that was interpreted by some as the film-maker's cathartic response to the Manson slayings.

In 1974, Polanski was back in Hollywood for his greatest triumph, Chinatown, a tale of greed, corruption and incest set in 1930s Los Angeles. The film garnered 11 Academy Award nominations.

But three years later Polanski was arrested in California on charges of unlawful sexual intercourse with a thirteen-year-old girl, and subsequently spent 42 days under evaluation in the State Psychiatric Prison.

But when the judge changed his mind, Polanski fled the US (never to return) before further criminal proceedings could get underway.

He made his next film, Thomas Hardy's Tess, in France two years later and picked up an Oscar nomination for Best Director.

1988 saw Polanski direct Frantic with Harrison Ford and Emmanuelle Seigner, the French actress he would go on to marry a year later.

Bitter Moon also starred his new wife and Polanski's Death And The Maiden, starring Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley, marked a return to some of his better work.

After a four-year hiatus he returned in 2000 with the thriller The Ninth Gate, starring Seigner and Johnny Depp.

But it was his next major work, The Pianist, which re-established him as a top-flight auteur and won him the prestigious Palm d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the ultimate accolade for a director - an Oscar.

The true-life story of a Polish composer who escaped a Nazi death camp, Polanski says of the film: "I always knew that one day I would make a film about this painful chapter in Polish history, but I didn't want it to be autobiographical."