Short answers, pulled from the story.
Polanski pleaded guilty to the charge of unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old minor following his arrest on the 11th of March 1977. He fled to France on the 31st of January 1978, the day before sentencing, after learning that judge Laurence J. Rittenband intended to disregard the plea bargain and sentence him to 50 years in prison. He has remained a fugitive from the American justice system since then.
Polanski escaped the Kraków Ghetto in 1943 with help from Polish Roman Catholics, including a woman who had promised his father shelter for the boy. He concealed his Jewish heritage by attending church, learning Catholic prayers by heart, and living among rural Catholic families. His mother was killed at Auschwitz and his father was sent to the Mauthausen concentration camps in Austria.
Polanski won the Academy Award for Best Director for The Pianist in 2002. Because he would have been arrested in the United States, he did not attend the ceremony in Hollywood. Actor Harrison Ford accepted the award on his behalf and presented the Oscar to Polanski in a public ceremony at the Deauville Film Festival five months later.
Sharon Tate was Polanski's wife. They met while making The Fearless Vampire Killers in 1967 and married in London on the 20th of January 1968. On the 9th of August 1969, while Polanski was working in London, Tate was murdered at their Los Angeles home by followers of Charles Manson. She was eight-and-a-half months pregnant at the time.
In May 2018 the Academy voted to expel Polanski under its revised Standards of Conduct, adopted in response to the #MeToo movement. The decision referenced his 1977 guilty plea to unlawful sex with a minor. Polanski became one of only four members ever expelled from the Academy.
Polanski holds the record for the most Best Director wins by a single director at the French César Awards, with five wins. His victories came for Tess, The Pianist, The Ghost Writer, Venus in Fur, and An Officer and a Spy. His fifth win, for An Officer and a Spy at the 2020 ceremony, was accepted on his behalf by his wife Emmanuelle Seigner amid widespread protests outside the Salle Pleyel in Paris.