Roman Polanski at Marrakech film festival last year. He was arrested as he arrived in Switzerland to attend an awards ceremony. Photograph: Abdelhak Senna/AFP/Getty Images

For 31 years he lived as the world's most celebrated fugitive, feted by his peers in the film industry while on the run from American police after admitting having sex with a child.

But, it was revealed today, the past has finally caught up with Roman Polanski. The film director was arrested in Switzerland on Saturday on a decades-old warrant relating to the rape of a 13-year-old girl in 1977.

The director had travelled to Switzerland to accept a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich film festival, the organisers of which expressed "great consternation and shock" at his detention.

The 76-year-old director of Rosemary's Baby and Chinatown pleaded guilty to the assault at the time but jumped bail and fled the US the following year to avoid a lengthy jail sentence. For more than three decades he has lived in exile in Paris, refusing to return to the US even when he won an Oscar in 2002 for The Pianist.

Zurich police said he was detained at immigration in Zurich on Saturday night at the request of the US justice department and was in custody awaiting extradition.

"I confirm that Mr Polanski has been arrested. The American authorities issued an international search request in 2005 in relation to a 1978 warrant," said Guido Balmer of the Swiss justice ministry. "There was a valid arrest request and we knew when he was coming. That's why he was taken into custody." The US will now need to make a formal extradition request, however, and Polanski is likely to challenge his detention in the Swiss courts.

Polanski was born in Paris to Polish parents and has French citizenship; France's culture minister Frédéric Mitterand said he was "dumbfounded" at the arrest, adding that he "strongly regrets that a new ordeal is being inflicted on someone who has already experienced so many of them". The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, "is following the case with great attention and shares the minister's hope that the situation can be quickly resolved", the minister said.

Polanski has a house in Switzerland and spent much of the summer there, according to British writer Robert Harris, who in recent months has been working closely with the director on a film adaptation of his novel The Ghost. Harris told the Guardian he thought there was "something very odd, very suspicious" about the timing of the arrest. "To my knowledge, Roman in recent years has travelled to Germany, Spain, Italy, Egypt, Greece, Russia, China. So why now, all of a sudden, is an elderly man grabbed off a plane on a Saturday night and stuffed into jail?"

The director was permitted one call to his wife, French actor Emmanuelle Seigner, who left their two young children to travel to Switzerland, Harris said. "This is a high-profile action designed to send out some sort of message to someone somewhere. No one condones what happened in the 70s, but I think this is pretty appalling."

A statement from the Swiss Association of Directors called it a "grotesque judicial farce and a monstrous cultural scandal", while the country's Association of Film Directors and Script Writers called the move "a slap in the face for the entire cultural community in Switzerland".

Polanski was 44 and already a twice-Oscar-nominated director in March 1977 when he had sex with Samantha Gailey, a 13-year-old model he had hired for a photoshoot, at Jack Nicholson's house in Los Angeles. He has argued that the sex was consensual, saying the girl was "not unresponsive", though Gailey said he drugged her with painkillers and champagne before carrying out a "very scary" assault.

The director pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse in a deal with prosecutors that saw them drop charges of rape, drugging and sodomy, which could have carried a life sentence, but fled the country in February 1978 when it became apparent that he was likely to serve time in prison.

Polanski's arrest is the latest twist in an extraordinary life that has been marked by violence, tragedy and controversy. His family returned to Poland shortly before the outbreak of the second world war and were forced into the Krakow ghetto with thousands of other Jewish families. The young Polanski escaped from the ghetto in 1943, but his parents were shipped to concentration camps, and his mother was murdered in Auschwitz.

Polanski married American actor Sharon Tate in 1968, but the following year, when eight months pregnant with his baby, she and four other people were brutally murdered by members of Charles Manson's "family".

In recent months, lawyers for Polanski have been seeking through the US courts to have the rape charges against him dropped, after new evidence emerged in a documentary that, they argued, showed he was a victim of "judicial misconduct" at his original trial. The film showed a former Los Angeles deputy district attorney admitting discussing the case with the trial judge while it was ongoing.

In February a Los Angeles judge agreed that "substantial … misconduct" had taken place during the original court proceedings, but said he could not drop the charges so long as Polanski remained a fugitive. Polanski has since appealed against the ruling, insisting he would not voluntarily return to the US even to clear his name.

Gailey, now called Samantha Geimer and a 44-year-old mother of three (pictured left), has also spoken in support of his attempt to dismiss the charges, accusing the district attorney's office of resurrecting "lurid details" of her assault to distract attention from its own wrongdoing. "True as they may be, the continued publication of those details causes harm to me."

She added: "I have survived, indeed prevailed against, whatever harm Mr Polanski may have caused me as a child."