The story of Roman Polanski's life has been tortuous and full of incident and tragedy as one of his dark films.

His Palme D'Or for The Pianist, a story of a virtuoso's escape from a Warsaw ghetto, marks the end of a journey for a director who reportedly turned down a chance to direct Schindler's List because of the painful memories.

Polanski survived the Nazi atrocities committed in the Krakow ghetto, but lost his mother in a concentration camp gas chamber.

Polanski could not direct Schindler's List

The Paris-born director went on to study at the prestigious Polish State Film College in Lodz and first came to international prominence with his feature debut Knife in the Water in 1962.

A claustrophobic thriller set on a weekend yacht trip, the film angered communist officials but won the critics prize at the Venice Film Festival.

Polanski moved to Hollywood and scored a major box office success with Rosemary's Baby.

Starring Mia Farrow as a woman who dreams she has been impregnated by the devil, the tense, uneasy 1968 film heavily-influenced the horror genre with its psychological tone.

Tragedy overwhelmed Polanski the following year, when his heavily-pregant wife Sharon Tate was brutally murdered, along with four others, by killers acting on the orders of Charles Manson.

Oppressive Macbeth

Dubbed the crime that "killed" the 1960s by some, the murders were part of the cult leader's deranged efforts to start a race war in America.

The traumatised Polanski made his return to film with an oppressive and gloomy version of Macbeth.

But Polanski's pinnacle in Hollywood came with Chinatown in 1974.

Polanski's wife was slain by the Manson Family

Jack Nicholson played JJ Gittes, a detective in the Philip Marlowe mould, in a California-set thriller shot through with the darker aspects of predecessors like the Maltese Falcon and the Big Sleep.

Chinatown won an Oscar for best original screenplay, and was nominated in 11 other categories.

Three years later, Polanski was charged with unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl at Jack Nicholson's house.

Facing a possible jail sentence if convicted, Polanski chose to jump bail and flee to Europe.

From then on he was unable to return to the US for fear of arrest and imprisonment, and even avoided making films in the UK because of the danger of extradition.

He was also reported to have started a relationship with actress Nastassja Kinski when she was 15.

During his time in Europe, he has mixed arthouse projects such as 1992's Bitter Moon featuring Hugh Grant, with more mainstream projects like Harrison Ford-vehicle Frantic (1988) and the recent supernatural thriller Ninth Gate, starring Johnny Depp.