Emmanuelle Seigner Defends Polanski Loyalty at Taormina
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- Emmanuelle Seigner is being feted with a career achievement award at the Taormina Film Festival, where she sat down with journalists for a wide-ranging roundtable on Saturday.
- Seigner is the lyricist for rock band L'Epée (with Anton Newcombe, Marie and Lionel Limiñanas), whose tracks have landed in Emily in Paris and Killing Eve — a new L'Epée album is in the works.
- Seigner shut down questions about Roman Polanski and the Samantha Geimer case with 'I don't want to talk about that. It's not my story,' then reaffirmed her 35-year loyalty, calling him 'a very good husband and a very good father and a very good man.'
- Seigner's daughter Morgane Polanski, who studied at London's Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, is preparing her first feature film — a horror movie being shot in the UK after three shorts.
- Seigner named her single career regret: not being ambitious enough early on, saying 'maybe if I was 20 again, I would be more ambitious… Now, I'm more ambitious, but it's a bit too late.'
- Seigner has three feature films in the pipeline across France, Italy, and the U.S., holds a U.S. working visa, and last appeared in Olmo Schnabel's Pet Shop Days (2023) opposite Willem Dafoe.
Why it matters: Seignner's on-record defense of Polanski as 'a very good man' comes after his ejection from AMPAS and effective persona non grata status at France's César Academy, making Taormina one of the few sympathetic platforms for the 92-year-old director — and her daughter Morgane's UK horror debut extends the family's filmmaking lineage into a new genre and generation.
