Director Roman Polanski, whose turbulent life has on occasion come close to resembling the violent, perverse world of his movies, was arrested in Zurich on a 1978 US arrest warrant for sex with a 13-year-old.
Mr Polanski, 76, had been due to receive a prize for his life's work at the Zurich Film Festival yesterday evening, opening a retrospective of his distinguished film career, but was arrested after arriving in Switzerland on Saturday night.
Calling Mr Polanski, who won Best Director Oscar for "The Pianist" in 2003, one of the greatest film directors of our time, festival organisers said they had "received this news with great consternation and shock".
French Culture Minister Frederic Mitterrand was "stunned" to hear about Mr Polanski's arrest, his office said, adding President Nicolas Sarkozy was following the case and hoped the matter could be resolved, allowing Mr Polanski to return to his family.
"We are going to try to lift the arrest warrant in Zurich ... the (extradition) convention between Switzerland and the United States is not very clear," Mr Polanski's lawyer, Georges Kiejman, told France Info radio.
"(Mitterrand) profoundly regrets that a new ordeal is being inflicted on someone who has already known so many during his life," the culture ministry said in a statement.
From early childhood when he escaped the Nazi holocaust in Poland, Mr Polanski's life has appeared, like his movies, to hover precariously on the brink of tragedy.
Born Raymond Polanski to Polish-Jewish parents on August 18, 1933, he spent the first three years of his life in Paris before the family returned to Poland. When the Germans sealed off the Jewish ghetto in Krakow in 1940, his father shouted to Roman to run and he escaped. His mother later died in an Auschwitz gas chamber.
Few lives have turned into the macabre public spectacle that Mr Polanski's has, first after the gruesome murder of his pregnant wife Sharon Tate in 1969 by the Charles Manson murder gang.
Zurich Cantonal Police spokesman Stefan Oberlin said the arrest of Mr Polanski, who holds French citizenship, was carried out on instruction from the Federal Justice Department in Berne. Mr Polanski was arrested in the US in the late 1970s and charged with giving drugs and alcohol to a 13-year-old girl and having unlawful sex with her at a photographic shoot at Jack Nicholson's Hollywood home.
Maintaining the girl was sexually experienced and had consented, Mr Polanski spent 42 days in prison undergoing psychiatric tests but fled the country before being sentenced.