The life of Zack: Druggy B-movies to ‘boob whisperer’
WHEN he appeared before delegates in Bournemouth in 2015, belting out soul classics and leading a choir’s chants of a “Lib Dem fightback”, Zack Polanski appeared to be the party’s rising star.
But just two years after taking to a bright-orange stage and speaking of how “patience, resilience and grit” would see the party bounce back from a catastrophic general election, he had quit to join the Greens.
His awkward speech as a 33-yearold to Liberal Democrat members may now be over a decade old but Mr Polanski’s brief flirtation with the party is symptomatic of his journey to the top of Left-wing politics.
Before becoming Green leader he dabbled in varying careers as a teacher, a counsellor, a trainer and an ill-fated spell as a hypnotherapist. He was also once had a fledgling acting career featuring in in B-movies as crack-cocaine smoking prisoner, a struggling artist and a college prankster.
Lib Dem candidate
Few in politics had heard of Mr Polanski until he appeared before delegates at Lib Dem conference in September 2015 after joining the party in the dying days of the Lib-dem and Conservative coalition government.
During the conference in Bournemouth, he led a choir where he was dressed in a black suit and spoke about what the party had achieved during five years in government.
“Absolutely,” he said when asked if the Lib Dems were fighting back, before breaking into a rendition of soul classic Ain’t No Mountain High
Enough. Acting career
Born in Salford in 1982 as David Paulden, he changed his name to acknowledge his Jewish heritage, and studied at Stockport Grammar School. He went on to study acting at the University of Aberystwyth and a theatre and film studies course at the University of Georgia in 2004.
Mr Polanski’s interest in acting began while he was still at school and in November 1999, he was featured in the Macclesfield Express
as Buttons ahead of a production of Cinderella.
By his mid-20s, he was being cast on screen, playing Joel Mallon in the 2007 film Art of Suicide about a group of young bohemians living in a loft.
In 2011, Polanski played a prisoner in the film Bashment, exploring London’s urban music scene and homophobia. After a character called Eggy is jailed, Mr Polanski makes a brief appearance as one of his cellmates where he sit cross-legged on a bunk bed in a prison tracksuit lighting up heroin or crack-cocaine on foil. The Green Party leader also starred in The Gallon Challenge in 2010 as Travis Carter, a college film major who, “after a series of unfortunate events, has no choice but to make a documentary about a milk drinking contest in order to graduate”. The film’s cover is a silhouette of Mr Polanski carrying a bottle of milk while the trailer for the 73-minute production features students throwing up, vandalising cars and a man pretending to have sex with a golf bag. It ends with Mr Polanski saying: “I’m a dangerous man.” The Green leader later wrote that if politics had always been part of the plan he “probably wouldn’t have accepted some of those ridiculous acting gigs”.
X Factor appearance
Mr Polanski performed on the live final of The X Factor as one of the backing singers for winner during Ben Haenow’s first rendition of his winner’s single Something I Need. The politician is seen dressed in a leather jacket and dancing.
Red Cross ‘spokesman’
In 2021 Polanski was elected to the London Assembly for the Greens and the following year he was elected as deputy leader of the party.
This week it emerged that while raising funds to stand as deputy leader, he falsely claimed to be a spokesman for the British Red Cross.
In 2020, on his personal website, he described working as a spokesman for the British Red Cross and said he was “really proud of the work we do”.
The British Red Cross said that he “has not been a spokesperson” and that it had contacted the party’s leadership team over the claims.
Speaking on Radio 4’s Today yesterday, Mr Polanski said acknowledged he was wrong to say he had been a spokesman for the British Red Cross.
‘Breast-enlarging’ hypnotherapist Mr Polanski has already faced questions over his former career as a hypnotherapist where he claimed he could increase a woman’s breast size.
The Green leader also boasted that his hypnotherapy business led to requests from men seeking to make their penises bigger.
The claims were made in blog posts and a 2019 article in which he admitted he had not been misrepresented by
The Sun newspaper. Mr Polanski conducted a hypnotherapy session in June 2013 with a Sun reporter, who claimed her bra size increased from 32 to 36 after his “treatment”.
Mr Polanski has repeatedly suggested that the newspaper portrayed him unfairly. However, in a 2019 article, Mr Polanski admitted that he was not misreported. “None of this is to say that the journalist did a bad job or misrepresented me,” he wrote.
In archived blog posts uncovered by
The Telegraph in March, Mr Polanski credited his two-page interview with
The Sun for helping him secure clients.
The Green Party said: “Zack has always been clear that this was not a service he offered and that this was an idea of a Sun journalist. He has apologised repeatedly.”