Reprieve for film's fugitive: Roman Polanski

After 30 years in self-imposed exile, Roman Polanski may be free to return to the United States. Photo / AP

Hushed inquiries were made in the corridors of power in London some years ago about the kind of reception Roman Polanski could expect if he were to turn up on British soil.

According to friends of the exiled film director, the feedback was mainly good. There would be no arrest but there would be no assurances about the future either. If an extradition request arrived from the United States, Polanski could find himself being sent to face trial again in California. The director decided not to go.

This month, there is a fresh suggestion that the original charges against Polanski, accused 31 years ago of the rape of a 13-year-old girl, may finally be dropped. Lawyers for the 75-year-old have argued in Los Angeles that a clear pattern of misconduct in the original prosecution had emerged.

The legal move follows a series of key disclosures about the trial made in Marina Zenovich's acclaimed documentary, Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired.

It crucially shows Roger Gunson, the assistant district attorney in charge of the case, admitting that, in the same position as Polanski, he would probably have fled the country too. Facing the prospect of a three-year prison sentence, the director flew to France.

Since then, he has visited only countries which have no full extradition treaty with the US.

At the heart of the charges against him is a terrible alleged crime but it is, in fact, just the third of three terrible crimes to have shadowed his life. Twice before, once as a Jewish boy in Poland and then as a brilliant young talent in Hollywood, Polanski was the victim of the kind of brutality that defies comprehension.

After first surviving the loss of his mother in the Holocaust, he travelled to America, where his young pregnant bride, actress Sharon Tate, was murdered by the Manson Family.

This slaughter, amid the excesses of Hollywood and the sordid rape charges that followed, are central to the myth of this great director, a man who has created a series of acknowledged cinematic classics, films such as Rosemary's Baby, Chinatown, Tess and The Pianist.

Polanski has had to accommodate near-demonic associations and has even written of his renown as "an evil, profligate dwarf". Yet for the last 20 years, he has lived happily in Paris, the city where he was born to Polish parents in 1933.