Who Is Roman Polanski? Director’s Wife Sharon Tate Was Murdered By Charles Manson Cult

Charles Manson, who masterminded the brutal murder of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and others in 1969, has died. Tate’s widower, film director Roman Polanski, recently explained how he survived the horror.

“I had to have a moment when I stopped thinking about it,” he told Der Spiegel in 2013. “When it happened, my friends said to me: You have to get back to work. But it’s impossible to work in that situation. You're incapable of working. The only thing that truly brings relief is time. Nothing else.”

Polanski, 84, was born in 1933 Paris to Polish-Jewish parents and his family moved to his father’s native home in Krakow, Poland, in 1937 before they were imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps. His mother perished at Auschwitz. Polanski escaped the Krakow ghetto and was reunited with his father after the war before he left for the United States.

Polanski directed several films in Hollywood before making the hit “Rosemary’s Baby” in 1968. It was his first box office success and full Hollywood production and starred Mia Farrow.

On Aug. 9, 1969, while Polanski was on a work trip in London, his wife and four other people were murdered at the couple’s rented house in Los Angeles by followers of cult leader Manson. Tate was eight months pregnant at the time of her death. The gravestone memorializes “Sharon Tate Polanski” and “Paul Richard Polanski, Their Baby.”

Polanski’s legal issues began in 1977, when he was arrested for drugging and raping a 13-year old girl, later identified as Samantha Gailey, in Los Angeles. Polanski was briefly jailed. He pled guilty to statutory rape but fled the U.S. in February 1978, the day before his sentencing hearing.

He has never returned to the U.S. and remains on INTERPOL lists. France and Poland have protected the film director from extradition in a highly controversial move that has drawn recent attention as other accusers have made sexual assault claims against him.

Polanski dedicated his 1980 movie “Tess,” an adaptation of the novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles, “to Sharon.” The movie starred actress Nastassja Kinski, his then-18-year-old lover. Tate reportedly had given a copy of the book to Polanski the last day that he saw her alive.

He married French actress Emmanuelle Seigner in 1989 and the couple has two children.

Polanski was awarded an Oscar for Best Director in 2003 for his work on the film, “The Pianist,” but did not travel to the U.S. to attend the ceremony.

In the 2013 interview about his response to the Manson family murders, Polanski refused to use Charles Manson's name. “I often used to wonder how I made it through that period,” he said.