Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Early life

Raymond Roman Thierry Polański born 18 August 1933, is a French and Polish film director, producer, screenwriter, and actor. He is the recipient of numerous accolades, including an Academy Award, two British Academy Film Awards, ten César Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, as well as the Golden Bear and a Palme d’Or.

Roman Polanski was born on 18 August 1933, in interbellum Paris. Polanski’s father was Jewish and originally from Poland. Polanski’s mother was born in Russia. Her own mother was Jewish, but Bula had been raised in the Catholic faith.  She had a daughter, Annette, by her previous husband. Annette survived Auschwitz, where her mother was murdered, and left Poland forever for France.

The Polański family moved back to Kraków, Poland, in early 1937,  and were living there when World War II began with the invasion of Poland. Kraków was soon occupied by the German forces, and the racist and anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws made the Polańskis targets of persecution, forcing them into the Kraków Ghetto, along with thousands of the city’s Jews.

Polanski witnessed both the ghettoization of Kraków’s Jews into a compact area of the city, and the subsequent deportation of all the ghetto’s Jews to German death camps. He watched as his father was taken away. He remembers from age six, one of his first experiences of the terrors to follow:

I had just been visiting my grandmother … when I received a foretaste of things to come. At first, I didn’t know what was happening. I simply saw people scattering in all directions. Then I realized why the street had emptied so quickly. Some women were being herded along it by German soldiers. Instead of running away like the rest, I felt compelled to watch. One older woman at the rear of the column couldn’t keep up. A German officer kept prodding her back into line, but she fell down on all fours … Suddenly a pistol appeared in the officer’s hand. There was a loud bang, and blood came welling out of her back. I ran straight into the nearest building, squeezed into a smelly recess beneath some wooden stairs, and didn’t come out for hours. I developed a strange habit: clenching my fists so hard that my palms became permanently calloused. I also woke up one morning to find that I had wet my bed

The author Ian Freer concludes that Polanski’s constant childhood fears and dread of violence have contributed to the “tangible atmospheres he conjures up on film”.[22] By the time the war ended in 1945, a fifth of the Polish population had been killed,[23] the vast majority being civilians. Of those deaths, 3 million were Polish Jews, which accounted for 90% of the country’s Jewish population.[24] According to Sandford, Polanski would use the memory of his mother, her dress and makeup style, as a physical model for Faye Dunaway’s character in his film Chinatown (1974).

Film Career

Polanski’s fascination with cinema began very early when he was around age four or five.  He would watch German newsreels being project in a square through a fence in the Krakow ghetto.  

Polanski attended the National Film School in Łódź, the third-largest city in Poland. Polanski’s directorial debut was also in 1955 with a short film Rower (Bicycle). Rower is a semi-autobiographical feature film, believed to be lost, which also starred Polanski. It refers to his real-life violent altercation with a notorious Kraków felon, Janusz Dziuba, who arranged to sell Polanski a bicycle, but instead beat him badly and stole his money. 

Polanski’s first feature-length film, Knife in the Water, was also one of the first significant Polish films after the Second World War that did not have a war theme. Knife in the Water is about a wealthy, unhappily married couple who decide to take a mysterious hitchhiker with them on a weekend boating excursion. Knife in the Water was a major commercial success in the West and gave Polanski an international reputation. The film also earned its director his first Academy Award nomination (Best Foreign Language Film) in 1963.

Rosemary’s Baby (1968)

Paramount studio head Robert Evans brought Polanski to America ostensibly to direct the film Downhill Racer, but told Polanski that he really wanted him to read the horror novel Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin to see if a film could be made out of it. Polanski read it non-stop through the night and the following morning decided he wanted to write as well as direct it. He wrote the 272-page screenplay in just over three weeks. The film, Rosemary’s Baby (1968), was a box-office success and became his first Hollywood production, thereby establishing his reputation as a major commercial filmmaker. The film, a horror-thriller set in trendy Manhattan, is about Rosemary Woodhouse (Mia Farrow), a young housewife who is impregnated by the devil. Polanski’s screenplay adaptation earned him a second Academy Award nomination.

Known For

Box set