Roman Polanski

Roman Polanski Net Worth 2025: Earnings & Career

Roman Polanski, a renowned Polish and French filmmaker, has had a storied career marked by both critical acclaim and controversy. Born on August 18, 1933, Polanski is known for his work in film direction, production, and acting. This article explores his life, career, and net worth in 2025.

Personal Profile About Roman Polanski

Age, Biography, and Wiki

Roman Polanski was born on August 18, 1933, in Paris, France, to Polish-Jewish parents. His family moved back to Poland in 1937, and during World War II, he survived the Holocaust by concealing his Jewish identity. Polanski began his career in film in the 1950s and quickly gained recognition for his work. He is famously known for directing notable films like Knife in the Water, Repulsion, and Rosemary’s Baby.

Occupation Film Producer
Date of Birth 18 August 1933
Age 91 Years
Birth Place Paris, France
Horoscope Leo
Country France

Height, Weight & Measurements

Polanski's physical measurements are not widely documented, but he is often noted for his distinctive appearance.

Height
Weight
Body Measurements
Eye Color
Hair Color

Dating & Relationship Status

Roman Polanski was married to Barbara Kwiatkowska from 1959 to 1962. He then married actress Sharon Tate in 1968, but she was tragically murdered by the Manson Family in 1969. Polanski married actress Emmanuelle Seigner in 1989, and they are still together.

Polanski's parents moved the family from his birthplace in Paris back to Kraków in 1937. Two years later, the invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany started World War II, and the family found themselves trapped in the Kraków Ghetto. After his mother and father were taken in raids, Polanski spent his formative years in foster homes, surviving the Holocaust by adopting a false identity and concealing his half Jewish heritage. In 1969, Polanski's pregnant wife, actress Sharon Tate, was murdered, along with four friends by members of the Manson Family in an internationally notorious case.

He was the son of Bula (aka "Bella") Katz-Przedborska and Mojżesz (or Maurycy) Liebling (later Polański), a painter and manufacturer of sculptures, who after World War II was known as Ryszard Polański. Polanski's father was Jewish and originally from Poland. Her own father was Jewish and mother was a Gentile, 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. Polanski's parents were both agnostics. Polanski later stated that he was an atheist.

Polanski's father was transferred, along with thousands of other Jews, to Mauthausen, a group of 49 German concentration camps in Austria. His mother, who was four months pregnant at the time, was taken to Auschwitz and killed in the gas chamber soon after arriving. The forced exodus took place immediately after the German liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, a real-life backdrop to Polanski's film The Pianist (2002). Polanski, who was then hiding from the Germans, saw his father being marched off with a long line of people. Polanski tried getting closer to his father to ask him what was happening and got within a few yards. His father saw him, but afraid his son might be spotted by the German soldiers, whispered (in Polish), "Get lost!"

Polanski escaped the Kraków Ghetto in 1943 and survived with the help of some Polish Roman Catholics, including a woman who had promised Polanski's father that she would shelter the boy. Polanski attended church, learned to recite Catholic prayers by heart, and behaved outwardly as a Roman Catholic, although he was never baptized. His efforts to blend into a Catholic household failed miserably at least once, when the parish priest visiting the family posed questions to him one-on-one about the catechism, and ultimately said, "You aren't one of us". The punishment for helping a Jew in German-occupied Poland was death.

As Polanski roamed the countryside trying to survive in a Poland now occupied by German troops, he witnessed many horrors, such as being "forced to take part in a cruel and sadistic game in which German soldiers took shots at him for target practice". 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". By the time the war ended in 1945, a fifth of the Polish population had been killed, the vast majority being civilians. Of those deaths, 3 million were Polish Jews, which accounted for 90% of the country's Jewish population. 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).

After the war, Polanski was reunited with his father and moved back to Kraków. His father remarried on 21 December 1946 to Wanda Zajączkowska (whom Polanski had never liked) and died of cancer in 1984. Time repaired the family contacts; Polanski visited them in Kraków, and relatives visited him in Hollywood and Paris. Polanski recalls the villages and families he lived with as relatively primitive by European standards: "They were really simple Catholic peasants. This Polish village was like the English village in Tess. Very primitive. No electricity. The kids with whom I lived didn't know about electricity ... they wouldn't believe me when I told them it was enough to turn on a switch!"

Polanski's fascination with cinema began very early when he was around age four or five. He recalls this period in an interview: "Even as a child, I always loved cinema and was thrilled when my parents would take me before the war. Then we were put into the ghetto in Krakòw and there was no cinema, but the Germans often showed newsreels to the people outside the ghetto, on a screen in the market place. And there was one particular corner where you could see the screen through the barbed wire. I remember watching with fascination, although all they were showing was the German army and German tanks, with occasional anti-Jewish slogans inserted on cards."

On 9 August 1969, while Polanski was working in London, his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and four other people were murdered at the Polanskis' residence in Los Angeles by cult leader Charles Manson's followers.

Tess (1979) He dedicated his next film, Tess (1979), to the memory of his late wife, Sharon Tate. It was Tate who first suggested he read Tess of the d'Urbervilles, which she thought would make a good film; he subsequently expected her to star in it. Nearly a decade after Tate's death, he met Nastassja Kinski, a model and aspiring young actress who had already been in a number of European films. He offered her the starring role, which she accepted. Her father was Klaus Kinski, a leading German actor, who had introduced her to films.

Frantic (1988) Frantic (1988) was a Hitchcockian suspense-thriller starring Harrison Ford and the actress/model Emmanuelle Seigner, who later became Polanski's wife. The film follows an ordinary tourist in Paris whose wife is kidnapped. He attempts, hopelessly, to go through the Byzantine bureaucratic channels to deal with her disappearance, but finally takes matters into his own hands. The film was a commercial failure but received positive reviews from critics.

The film was released in North America to critical acclaim. Roger Ebert praised in particular Polanski, writing, "[His] direction is masterful." and added "Polanski is reflecting, I believe, his own deepest feelings: that he survived, but need not have, and that his mother died and left a wound that had never healed." Polanski later won the 2002 Academy Award for Best Director. Because Polanski would have been arrested in the United States, he did not attend the Academy Awards ceremony in Hollywood. After the announcement of the Best Director Award, Polanski received a standing ovation from most of those present in the theater. Actor Harrison Ford accepted the award for Polanski and then presented the Oscar to him at the Deauville Film Festival five months later in a public ceremony. Polanski later received the Crystal Globe award for outstanding artistic contribution to world cinema at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in 2004.

Polanski's French-language adaptation of the play Venus in Fur, stars his wife Emmanuelle Seigner and Mathieu Amalric. Polanski worked with the play's author, David Ives, on the screenplay. The film was shot from December 2012 to February 2013 in French and is Polanski's first non-English-language feature film in forty years. The film premiered in competition at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival on 25 May 2013.

In May 2018, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences stated that the board "has voted to expel actor Bill Cosby and director Roman Polanski from its membership in accordance with the organisation's Standards of Conduct." Polanski is one of only four members to have been expelled from the academy. Following its expulsion of Harvey Weinstein, the academy's Standards of Conduct had recently been revised as a result of impacts of the #MeToo and Time's Up movements on the film industry. The same year, his wife Emmanuelle Seigner rejected the invitation to join the academy, denouncing the "hypocrisy" of a group that expelled Polanski.

Polanski's 2019 film An Officer and a Spy, centers on the notorious 19th century Dreyfus affair. The film stars Jean Dujardin as French officer Georges Picquart and follows his struggle from 1896–1906 to expose the truth about the doctored evidence that led to Alfred Dreyfus, one of the few Jewish members of the French Army's general staff, being wrongly convicted of passing military secrets to the German Empire and sent to Devil's Island. The film is written by Robert Harris, who was working with Polanski for the third time. It co-stars Louis Garrel as Dreyfus, Mathieu Amalric and Polanski's wife Emmanuelle Seigner. It was produced by Alain Goldman's Legende Films and distributed by Gaumont. Filming began on 26 November 2018 and was completed on 28 April 2019.

In February 2020, Polanski won Best Director at France's 2020 Cesar Awards. Neither Polanski nor the cast and crew of An Officer and a Spy (J'accuse) attended the awards ceremony hosted at the Salle Pleyel in Paris. Polanski said that he will not submit himself to a "public lynching" over rape accusations he denies. Addressing the accusations of sexual assault leveled at him, he said, "Fantasies of unhealthy minds are now treated as proven facts." This is Polanski's fifth Best Director Cesar win, the record for a single director; he previously won for Tess, The Pianist, The Ghost Writer, and Venus in Fur. Polanski's wife Emmanuelle Seigner accepted the award on his behalf.

Prior to the awards ceremony, Polanski released a statement, saying, "For several days, people have asked me this question: Will I or won't I attend the Cesar ceremony? The question I ask in turn is this: How could I?. [...] The way the night will unfold, we already know in advance," he continued. "Activists have already threatened me with a public lynching, some have announced protests in front of the Salle Pleyel. Others intend to make it a platform to denounce (the) governing body. It promises to look more like a symposium than a celebration of cinema." Polanski said he was skipping the ceremony in order to protect his team as well as his wife and children, who "have been made to suffer injuries and affronts." Making reference to the recent media scandal that led to the Cesar board's mass resignation, Polanski added: "The press and social media have presented our 12 nominations as if they were gifts offered to us by the academy's board of directors, as some authoritarian gesture that had forced their resignations. Doing so undermines the secret vote of the 4,313 professionals who alone decide the nominations and the more than 1.5 million viewers who came to see the film."

Polanski met actress Sharon Tate while filming The Fearless Vampire Killers, and during the production, the two of them began dating. On 20 January 1968, Polanski and Tate married in London.

In March 2023, Geimer and her husband met with Polanski and his wife Seigner for a French magazine cover interview. Geimer states in the interview: "Let me be very clear: what happened with Polanski was never a big problem for me. I didn't even know it was illegal, that someone could be arrested for it. I was fine, I'm still fine. It was so unfair and so in opposition to justice ... Everyone should know by now that Roman has served his sentence. Which was ... long, if you want my opinion. Anyone who thinks that he deserves to be in prison is wrong. It isn't the case today and it wasn't the case yesterday."

In 1999, Lewis had an interview with the UK's News of the World where she asserted that she had a six-month tryst with Polanski when she was 17. Lewis also talked about how Polanski treated her in the relationship: "Roman would say, ‘You’re gaining weight’. It was ridiculous—I was a thin teenage girl, but I took it seriously and stopped eating. Then I'd overeat, and for years I suffered from bulimia. I know that was the start."

During an interview with Paris Match in 2019, Polanski was asked about Charlotte Lewis' accusations, to which he responded "It's an odious lie!" He also pulled out a press clipping of her 1999 interview, quoting her talk about having sex with many men by the age of 14. In the interview Lewis discloses that she was drugged and prostituted at 14, which led to her sexual promiscuity and her relationship with numerous film stars, including Polanski.

Parents
Husband Barbara Kwiatkowska-Lass (m. 1959-1962) Sharon Tate (m. 20 January 1968-8 August 1969) Emmanuelle Seigner (m. 30 August 1989)
Sibling
Children

Net Worth and Salary

As of 2023, Roman Polanski's net worth is estimated to be around $50 million. This figure reflects his successful career in filmmaking, despite his legal issues and controversies.

In December 2017, Polanski filed a ₪1.5 million suit in Herzliya Magistrates' Court against Israeli journalist and filmmaker Matan Uziel. Polanski maintained that Uziel, through his website, www.imetpolanski.com, falsely reported that five women had come forward to accuse him of raping them. Polanski was suing for libel and defamation of character. Herzliya Magistrates' Court rejected Polanski's request to be exempt from appearing in court after filing the libel suit. While Polanski gave various reasons for his inability to appear, the presiding judge, Gilad Hess, dismissed them one by one and ordered Polanski to pay Uziel ₪10,000 in costs. In November 2018, it was published that Polanski decided to drop the lawsuit, and was ordered by the court to pay Uziel ₪30,000 (US$8,000) for court costs. The court accepted Uziel's request that the suit not be dropped, but rather that it be rejected, making Polanski unable to sue Uziel again over the same issue in the future.

Career, Business, and Investments

Polanski's career spans over six decades, with notable achievements including an Academy Award, BAFTA Awards, Golden Globe Awards, and a Palme d'Or. He has directed films in multiple countries, including Poland, the UK, and the U.S. Despite facing legal challenges in the U.S., Polanski continues to work in Europe.

In 1977, Polanski was arrested for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl. He pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of unlawful sex with a minor in exchange for a probation-only sentence. The night before his sentencing hearing in 1978, he learned that the judge would likely reject the proffered plea bargain, so he fled the U.S. to Europe, where he continued his career. He remains a fugitive from the U.S. justice system. Further allegations of abuse have been made by other women.

Polanski's first feature-length film, Knife in the Water (1962), made in Poland, was nominated for the United States Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. A few years later he first left for France and then moved to the United Kingdom, where he directed his first three English-language feature-length films: Repulsion (1965), Cul-de-sac (1966), and The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967). In 1968, he settled in the United States and cemented his status in the film industry by directing the horror film Rosemary's Baby (1968). He made Macbeth (1971) in England and Chinatown (1974) back in Hollywood. His other critically acclaimed films include The Tenant (1976), Tess (1979), Death and the Maiden (1994), The Pianist (2002) which won him the Academy Award for Best Director, The Ghost Writer (2010), Venus in Fur (2013), and An Officer and a Spy (2019). Polanski has made 23 feature films to date. He has also starred in several Polish films as well as in his own films.

Polanski was above all influenced by Carol Reed's Odd Man Out (1947) – "I still consider it as one of the best movies I've ever seen and a film which made me want to pursue this career more than anything else ... I always dreamt of doing things of this sort or that style. To a certain extent I must say that I somehow perpetuate the ideas of that movie in what I do."

Polanski left then-communist Poland and moved to France, where he had already made two notable short films in 1961: The Fat and the Lean and Mammals. While in France, Polanski contributed one segment ("La rivière de diamants") to the French-produced omnibus film, Les plus belles escroqueries du monde (English title: The Beautiful Swindlers) in 1964. (He has since had the segment removed from all releases of the film.) However, Polanski found that in the early 1960s, the French film industry was xenophobic and generally unwilling to support a rising filmmaker of foreign origin.

The Palace began filming in February 2022 in Gstaad, Switzerland. The film stars Mickey Rourke, Fanny Ardant, and Oliver Masucci, and is a black comedy about the guests at a Swiss luxury hotel on New Year's Eve 1999. Polanski co-wrote the screenplay with fellow Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski, who also co-wrote Polanski's first feature, Knife in the Water, in 1962. The film was unable to find financing in France due to souring French public opinion of Polanski following a new round of sexual assault allegations, and ended up being primarily funded by the Italian company, RAI Cinema. Polanski's reputation also brought casting challenges, with a number of actors turning down roles for fear of tarnishing their careers. RAI Cinema and Eliseo Entertainment produced the film. The film had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on 2 September 2023, before it was released theatrically in Italy by 01 Distribution on 28 September 2023.

In late December 2019, in Polanski's interviews with Paris Match and Gazeta Wyborcza, the latter accused Matan Uziel of carefully orchestrating the attacks on his character and for playing a major role in designing an international campaign to besmirch his name and reputation in order to make his career fall from grace.

Social Network

Polanski is not highly active on social media platforms, but his work is widely discussed and shared by fans and film enthusiasts.

What? (1972) Written by Polanski and previous collaborator Gérard Brach, What? (1972) is a mordant absurdist comedy loosely based on the themes of Alice in Wonderland and Henry James. The film is a rambling shaggy dog story about the sexual indignities that befall a winsome young American hippie woman hitchhiking through Europe.

At the time, there were rumors that Polanski and Kinski became romantically involved, which he confirmed in a 1994 interview with Diane Sawyer, but Nastassja says the rumors are untrue; they were never lovers or had an affair. She admits that "there was a flirtation. There could have been a seduction, but there was not. He had respect for me." She also recalls his influence on her while filming: "He was really a gentleman, not at all like the things I had heard. He introduced me to beautiful books, plays, movies. He educated me." On an emotional level, she said years later that "he was one of the people in my life who cared, ... who took me seriously and gave me a lot of strength." She told David Letterman more about her experience working with Polanski during an interview.

Polanski's Based on a True Story is an adaptation of the French novel by bestselling author Delphine de Vignan. The film follows a writer (Emmanuelle Seigner) struggling to complete a new novel, while followed by an obsessed fan (Eva Green). It started production in November 2016 from a script adapted by Polanski and Olivier Assayas. It premiered out of competition at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival on 27 May 2017 and opened in France on 1 November 2017.

Despite Polanski's absence from the awards ceremony, his nomination and win sparked protests due to the rape charges that he still faces. The protestors held up signs with slogans like "Shame on an industry that protects rapists." Police clashed with protestors, even firing tear gas upon them. Actions were also taken by celebrities, such as Adèle Haenel, Noémie Merlant, and Celine Sciamma who walked out of the awards. Many other celebrities and feminists spoke out against Polanski online, such as NousToutes, a French feminist collective, who called the win "shameful", and Jessica Chastain tweeted, "I Fucking Stan" in regard to the protests. At the same time some celebrities came to his defense, like actress Fanny Ardant, who said, "When I love someone, I love them passionately. And I love Roman Polanski a lot... a lot... So I'm very happy for him. Then, I understand that not everyone agrees but long live freedom!" and actress Brigitte Bardot who said, "Thankfully Polanski exists and he is saving cinema from its mediocrity! I judge him on his talent and not on his private life! I regret never having shot with him!" The actor Lambert Wilson called the protest campaign against Polanski "abominable public lynching", as did Isabelle Huppert, who stated that "lynching is a form of pornography". Likewise, Polanski's alleged victim Samantha Geimer criticized the protesters as "very opportunistic", and said that "If you want to change the world today, you do it by... demanding people be held accountable today, not by picking someone who is famous and thinking that if you demonise him for things that happened decades ago that somehow that has any value in protecting people and changing society".

The inclusion of films from Polanski, Woody Allen, and Luc Besson at the 2023 Venice Film Festival was controversial and brought significant criticism to its organizers due to the various sex abuse allegations against all three. Festival head Alberto Barbera defended their inclusion, saying of Polanski specifically, "I don't understand why one cannot distinguish between the responsibilities of the man and those of the artist. Polanski is 90 years old, he is one of the few working masters, he made an extraordinary film. It may be the last film of his career, although I hope he does like De Oliveira, who made films until he was 105. I stand firmly among those who in the debate distinguish between the responsibility of the man and that of the artist."

Education

Polanski's formal education is somewhat limited due to his experiences during World War II. However, he attended the Łódź Film School in Poland, where he honed his filmmaking skills.

In summary, Roman Polanski's net worth and career are a testament to his enduring influence in the film industry, despite the controversies surrounding him.

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. Around the age of six, Polanski attended primary school for only a few weeks, until "all the Jewish children were abruptly expelled", writes biographer Christopher Sandford. That initiative was soon followed by the requirement that all Jewish children over the age of twelve wear white armbands, with a blue Star of David imprinted, for visual identification. After he was expelled, Polanski would not be allowed to enter another classroom for six years.

After the war, Polanski watched films, either at school or at a local cinema, using whatever pocket money he had. Polanski writes, "Most of this went on the movies, but movie seats were dirt cheap, so a little went a long way. I lapped up every kind of film." As time went on, movies became more than an escape into entertainment, as he explains: "Movies were becoming an absolute obsession with me. I was enthralled by everything connected with the cinema—not just the movies themselves but the aura that surrounded them. I loved the luminous rectangle of the screen, the sight of the beam slicing through the darkness from the projection booth, the miraculous synchronization of sound and vision, even the dusty smell of the tip-up seats. More than anything else though, I was fascinated by the actual mechanics of the process."

Polanski attended the National Film School in Łódź, the third-largest city in Poland. In the 1950s, Polanski took up acting, appearing in Andrzej Wajda's Pokolenie (A Generation, 1954) and in the same year in Silik Sternfeld's Zaczarowany rower (Enchanted Bicycle or Magical Bicycle). 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. In real life, the offender was arrested while fleeing after fracturing Polanski's skull, and executed for three murders, out of eight prior such assaults which he had committed. Several other short films made during his study at Łódź gained him considerable recognition, particularly Two Men and a Wardrobe (1958) and When Angels Fall (1959). He graduated in 1959.

The Fearless Vampire Killers/Dance of the Vampires (1967) The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) (known by its original title, "Dance of the Vampires" in most countries outside the United States) is a parody of vampire films. The plot concerns a buffoonish professor and his clumsy assistant, Alfred (played by Polanski), who are traveling through Transylvania in search of vampires. The Fearless Vampire Killers was Polanski's first feature to be photographed in color with the use of Panavision lenses, and included a striking visual style with snow-covered, fairy-tale landscapes, similar to the work of Soviet fantasy filmmakers. In addition, the richly textured color schemes of the settings evoke the paintings of the Belarusian-Jewish artist Marc Chagall, who provides the namesake for the innkeeper in the film. The film was written for Jack MacGowran, who played the lead role of Professor Abronsius.

Because the role required having a local dialect, Polanski sent her to London for five months of study and to spend time in the Dorset countryside to get a flavor of the region. In the film, Kinski starred opposite Peter Firth and Leigh Lawson.

Bitter Moon (1992) In 1992 Polanski followed with the dark psycho-sexual film Bitter Moon. The film starred Seigner, Hugh Grant, and Kristin Scott Thomas. Film critic Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote, "Whatever else Mr. Polanski may be – nasty, mocking, darkly subversive in his view of the world – he definitely isn't dull. Bitter Moon is the kind of world-class, defiantly bad film that has a life of its own."

Polanski shot Carnage in February/March 2011. The film is a screen version of Yasmina Reza's play God of Carnage, a comedy about two couples who meet after their children get in a fight at school, and how their initially civilized conversation devolves into chaos. It stars Kate Winslet, Jodie Foster, Christoph Waltz and John C. Reilly. Though set in New York, it was shot in Paris. The film had its world premiere on 9 September 2011 at the Venice Film Festival and was released in the United States by Sony Pictures Classics on 16 December 2011.

In February 1969, Polanski and Tate began renting the home at 10050 Cielo Drive in the Benedict Canyon region of Los Angeles. In August, while Polanski was in Europe working on a film, Tate remained home, eight-and-a-half months pregnant. The Manson Family cult broke into the home late in the evening of 8 August and proceeded to murder Tate and four others. Tate's unborn child was posthumously named Paul Richard Polanski. Charles Manson, along with members of the cult, was arrested in late 1969, eventually tried, and found guilty in 1971 of first-degree murder.

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