Roman Polanski Was Once Married to Manson Family Murder Victim Sharon Tate — Did He Remarry?

In the 2014 book Sharon Tate Recollections, director Roman Polanski wrote about his late wife and what it was like after she was brutally murdered by the Manson family. The book is a collection of tributes to Sharon via photographs, retrospective quotes from famous friends, and essays written specifically for it. Her controversial husband penned the foreword.

"Even after so many years, I find myself unable to watch a spectacular sunset or visit a lovely old house or experience visual pleasure of any kind without instinctively telling myself how much she would have loved it all," he wrote. "In these ways, I shall remain faithful to her 'til the day I die." In that sense, Polanski never left Sharon's side. However, he eventually found someone else to consider a sunset with. Is he married? Here's what we know.

As lovely as Polanski's words about his late wife are, they are somewhat tainted by the numerous controversies that followed him in the wake of her murder. He has been accused by multiple women of sexually assaulting them when they were minors. Polanski has settled two civil lawsuits brought against him. After being told he would get probation, he plead guilty to one of these. Upon finding out the judge was going to send him to prison, Polanski fled the United States in February 1978.

Eight years after Polanski arrived in France, where the infamous director had citizenship, he met his current wife, per Variety. The year was 1985, and he was in pre-production for the "big-budget adventure movie Pirates." This movie was riddled with problems and would end up being a failure, but in the meantime, Polanski was looking for a drag performer to play a "female impersonator" in the film. He and casting director Dominique Besnehard headed to a Paris drag cabaret show.

Besnehard invited his friend, a model-turned-actor who recently had a small role in Jean-Luc Godard’s Detective. That person was Emmanuelle Seigner. Polanski told the outlet that was the "best casting of his career." He then added, "It’s funny that I met my wife through a casting director, but it had nothing to do with the film, because there was no role for her." The couple married in 1989 and have two children together.

Polanski married Polish actor Barbara Kwiatkowska-Lass in 1959 when she was 19 years old. They divorced two years later. Not much is known about their brief time together. What we do know is that Polanski is pretty transparent when it comes to his attraction to much younger women. In his autobiography he wrote about the young girls he claimed brought him comfort after Tate's murder.

"It was now that Kathy, Madeleine, Sylvia, and others whose names I forget played a fleeting but therapeutic role in my life," said Polanski. "They were all between 16 and 19 years old, schoolgirls no longer but not yet worldly-wise women with professional or marital ambitions." He met these girls at a finishing school in Gstaad, Switzerland. Sometimes while waiting for them in front of the school, Polanski would wonder what he was doing there.