LAST Saturday evening, the moment Roman Polanksi had been running from for the past 31 years finally caught up with him. The 76-year-old director had left his wife Emmanuelle Seigner and their two children at their home in Paris and had just arrived in Zurich airport on his way to the local film festival where he was to be honoured with a lifetime achievement award.

It was a route Polanski was familiar with, having spent this summer, as well as many other holidays, in a chalet in the upmarket ski resort of Gstaad, 200km from Zurich.

This time was different, however, and the director of films such as Chinatown, Rosemary's Baby and The Pianist was arrested on arrival by Swiss police. Polanski is now fighting extradition from Switzerland to the United States, where he is wanted. He had fled the US in 1978 on the eve of being sentenced having pleaded guilty to "unlawful sexual intercourse" with a 13-year-old girl.

The film industry has rallied around Polanski, with Woody Allen, David Lynch, Harvey Weinstein and Martin Scorsese signing a petition demanding his immediate release, while Whoopi Goldberg voiced her support, somewhat bizarrely, saying Polanski was never guilty of "rape-rape".

Senior politicians in his native Poland, and France, which he has made his home for three decades since fleeing America, have called for his release. Frederic Mitterrand, the French culture minister, said Polanski's arrest was proof of the "frightening" side of America.

The reasons why he has been arrested now, when he has spent the last 31 years in the public eye, are still unclear. The writer Robert Harris, with whom Polanski has been working on a film adaptation of his novel The Ghost, told the Guardian he thought there was "something very odd" and "suspicious" about the timing of the arrest.

"To my knowledge, Roman in recent years has travelled to Germany, Spain, Italy, Egypt, Greece, Russia, China," Harris said. "So why now, all of a sudden, is an elderly man grabbed off a plane on a Saturday night and stuffed into jail? This is a high-profile action designed to send out some sort of message to someone somewhere. No one condones what happened in the Seventies, but I think this is pretty appalling."

In 1977, Polanski was asked by French Vogue to take a series of photos of adolescent girls. One of the girls he chose to photograph was an aspiring actress called Samantha Gailey (now Samantha Geimer). He received permission from the girl's mother to take the photos, and on their second shoot Polanski took her to the home of his great friend Jack Nicholson, who was away at the time. He gave her champagne and a Quaalude, a sedative, and the sexual encounter took place.

"We did photos with me drinking champagne," Geimer later told Good Morning America. "He was friendly and then right toward the end it got a little scary, and I realised, you know, he had some other intentions, and then I knew I was not where I should be. I just didn't quite know how to get myself out of there."

During the encounter, another woman knocked at the door of the bedroom -- the Los Angeles Times later reported this to be Anjelica Huston, who was Nicholson's girlfriend at the time. The actress spoke with Polanski briefly, seemingly unaware of exactly what was happening inside, and went on her way.

Polanski has always denied that he knew the girl was just 13 and Huston, in a police probation report, backed up the suggestion that he could have been misled. "She appeared to be one of those kind of little chicks between -- could be any age up to 25. She did not look like a 13-year-old scared little thing," Huston said.

The next day, March 11, 1977, Polanski was arrested in the lobby of the Beverly Wilshire hotel, Los Angeles and subsequently charged with giving Quaaludes to a minor; child molestation; unlawful sexual intercourse with that minor; rape by use of drugs; oral copulation and sodomy.

Polanski never denied the charges, but under a plea bargain agreement he confessed to unlawful sex with a minor, while the other charges were dropped. Judge Laurence Rittenband ordered that Polanski be confined for psychiatric examination, which led to 42 days' imprisonment in the Chino State Prison.

He was deemed mentally fit to face trial in February 1978, but Polanski was under the impression that the plea bargain would mean that the 42 days he had already served would make up the entirety of the sentence. He then heard that Rittenband was set to break the agreement, for fear of the public reaction, and so the director skipped bail and flew to London. He has never returned to the United States.

The heady days of Los Angeles of the Seventies, when the world's of film, celebrity and rock and roll converged to form a valley of decadence, are perhaps best summarised in books such as Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Barney Hoskyns' Hotel California.

Chinatown, released in 1974, remains the pinnacle of Polanski's illustrious career, receiving 11 Oscars nominations including Best Director. During the writing of the movie, Polanski often came to blows with legendary screenwriter Robert Towne, with one story emphasising Polanski's penchant for young women.

"We fought every day over everything," Towne explained of their sessions at Polanski's house, before listing the various problems ranging from Towne's dog to the names of the characters and "the teenyboppers that Roman would run out and take Polaroid pictures of diving off the f***ing diving board without tops on".

For all the great films, the famous friends and legendary parties, Polanski's life will marked forever by three brutal events. Polanski was born in Paris, and when he was aged three the Polanski family moved back to Poland -- to Krakow -- where they lived for three years before the outbreak of the Second World War.

Confined to the ghetto following the German invasion, the nine-year-old Polanski was able to escape to a family friend's house during the Nazi liquidation, but his parents weren't so fortunate. His father was brought to the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp, and his mother to Auschwitz, from where she never returned.

The second great tragedy of his life was the murder of his wife Sharon Tate at their house at 10050 Cielo Drive in 1969. Tate, eight-and-a-half months pregnant at the time, was killed by Charles Manson and his "family" while Polanski was in London.

Following the murder, the distraught Polanski quit the United States and only returned three years later after being persuaded by producer Robert Evans and Nicholson to make Chinatown. It's debatable whether he ever fully recovered from Tate's murder, and the fact that he was out of the country when it took place. In her statement following his arrest in 1978, Anjelica Huston said of Polanski: "I don't think he's a bad man. I think he's an unhappy man."

Coincidentally, Susan Atkins -- the member of Manson's family known as Sexy Sadie who later claimed personal responsibility for stabbing Tate to death while ignoring her pleas for mercy -- died in prison just a day before Polanski's arrest.

The third haunting act in Polanski's life, in Jack Nicholson's home in March 1977, was entirely of his own doing. Despite everything else, it may prove to be his legacy.

- Evan Fanning

Sunday Independent