Fellini Foundation honours Polanski Director to receive lifetime achievement award (ANSA) - Rimini, October 4 - Top director Roman Polanski is to be given a lifetime achievement award by Italy's prestigious Federico Fellini Foundation . The 73-year-old filmmaker, actor and writer will collect the Fellini Foundation Prize - a gold-leaf statue bearing a dream-like drawing by the Italian maestro - in December . Foundation Chairman and filmmaker Pupi Avati praised Polanski on Tuesday as "a director of remarkable stature and courage whose resourcefulness is unmatched" . Polanski was particularly pleased by the honour as he is a life-long admirer of Fellini, ranking him alongside Orson Welles and Akira Kurosawa as one of the most inspirational directors ever born . Fellini, who died in 1993 at the age of 73, is also known to have admired Polanski, rating his 1967 Rosemary's Baby among his 40 favourite films. The pair actually met in 1969, on the set of Fellini's surreal Ancient Rome dreamscape movie Satyricon . The encounter was filmed by Gideon Bachmann who made a documentary about the making of Satyricon called Ciao Federico . The documentary includes possibly the last-ever footage of Polanski's tragic actress wife Sharon Tate, who was murdered not long afterwards by followers of cult leader Charles Manson . Polanski, who was born in France but grew up in Poland, will also pick up a lifetime achievement award from the European Film Academy in December . The director's films include The Tragedy of Macbeth, Chinatown, Tess, Frantic, Bitter Moon and The Pianist, for which he won an Oscar in 2002 along with its star, Adrien Brody . Polanski escaped from Poland during the Second World War but his parents were sent to a Nazi concentration camp and his mother died in the gas chambers . The director's experiences were evoked in The Pianist, which recounts the true story of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a Polish virtuoso pianist who miraculously survived the Warsaw Ghetto and the Holocaust but was the only member of his family to escape deportation . The film also won the coveted Palme d'Or at Cannes and the Donatello David for best foreign film, Italy's equivalent of an Oscar . Polanski will receive his Fellini award in Rimini, the Italian director's hometown, on December 16 . The Fellini Foundation, which is based in Rimini, was set up in 1995 at the request of Fellini's sister Maddalena with the aim of conserving and promoting the memory of her brother and his work . The foundation's career award was assigned last year to Hollywood director Martin Scorsese .