Having somehow managed to make Tate’s death the fault of her absent husband, the media had a field day when, a decade later, Polanski was charged with ‘a lewd and lascivious act upon and with the body’ of 13-year-old Samantha Gailey. ‘Pole on Perv Charge Faces 50 Years,’ crowed one headline, ‘Polanski the Predator’, screamed another. Was he a malign Svengali, ‘an evil tosser’ as one former friend opined, or, as others believed, an easy target for Republican moralists fitting him up for deportation?

‘Maybe Roman’s judgment was off on this occasion,’ observed Mia Farrow in a delphic understatement. Where his films themselves are concerned, apart from the over-derivative Harrison Ford vehicle Frantic or The Pirates, whose awfulness has turned it into a cult movie, Polanski’s judgment has seldom if ever been off. Some of Sandford’s best pages are devoted to the making of individual pictures. Sensibly he underplays Mansonian echoes in the 1971 Macbeth, complete with a nude sleepwalking scene and industrial quantities of blood, but always visually compelling. The long nightmare of Tess’s filming is presented as the prelude to a masterpiece of understated eloquence, while The Pianist draws much of its power from Polanski’s perennial gift for inspiring a diehard loyalty in those who work with him.

Biographies of living figures are generally embarrassing. This one, unauthorised, critically admiring, expertly put together, is an exception, a notable tribute to a rascal genius with an unending capacity for surprise.

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