When Roman Polanski won the best director Oscar in 2003 for The Pianist it appeared to herald his reconciliation with Hollywood.
Industry bigwigs lined up to praise him, while his agent mooted the possibility of a return to big-budget studio film-making. And yet Hollywood (as the White House is keen to remind us) is not America, and the US continues to view Polanski as a fugitive. The director jumped bail in 1978 after admitting statutory rape of an underage girl. He risks a jail term if he sets foot in Los Angeles.
But then Polanski has always seemed peculiarly suited to life as an undesirable, an exile, a stray. It is a role he perfected as a boy, running wild in occupied Europe after his family were sent to the concentration camps.
Even after the war, his was a life in constant, edgy motion. His acclaimed 1962 debut, A Knife in the Water, furnished an escape from his native Poland, and Repulsion made him a star of swinging London. Alighting in California, he became a fixture on the Hollywood scene, with a string of A-list pals and a party around every corner.
From a distance, 1960s-era Polanski was the immigrant dream made flesh. And yet the man has always given the impression of being as much cursed as he is blessed.
The evil that he encountered under Nazi occupation appears to have clung to him, dogging his every step.
One can glimpse it on screen, in the nightmare visions of Repulsion or in the twinkling Satanist neighbours in Rosemary's Baby, cosnatntly popping round with their herb tea and tanis root.
Robert Towne's original script for Chinatown ended with the crimes solved and the lovers united. Polanski conjured it into something more bleak and disturbing: the villain triumphant, corruption run riot, and the country gone to hell in a handcart. "Forget it, Jake, it's Chinatown."
More worryingly, it has habit of seeping into his off-screen existence, too, most violently in the 1969 murder by the Manson gang of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate. Many, of course, would regard the 1970s rape case as another, more pro-active brand of Polanski evil, although the girl in question now says she has forgiven him and has no objection to him returning to the US.
For the time being that seems unlikely. Over the past 25 years Polanski has had to content himself with shooting films in Europe; some of them good (Tess, Frantic), others less so (Pirates, The Ninth Gate).
When Steven Spielberg asked him to direct Schindler's List, Polanski refused, saying its material was too painful and close to home. He eventually revisited the subject in The Pianist, in which a Jewish musician hides in the abandoned buildings of the Warsaw ghetto.
For those who have studied this mercurial, puckish and disreputable genius down the years, The Pianist marked the point when Polanski finally began to make peace with his ghosts.
· Xan Brooks is editor of Guardian Unlimited Film
