Watching ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’ is a reminder of just how unsettling Roman Polanski remains

Inside Film: Quentin Tarantino shows him as Hollywood’s hottest director in his new movie about the Sharon Tate murder – but Polanski simply can’t shake off his 1977 underage sex scandal

Geoffrey Macnab
Thursday 01 August 2019 16:02 BST
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Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate in 1967
Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate in 1967

“Holy shit, it’s Roman Polanski,” the ageing movie star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) observes with awe to his stunt double/gofer/best friend, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), early on in Quentin Tarantino’s new feature, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Tarantino shows us Polanski (Rafał Zawierucha) driving in his vintage, open-top sports car, sitting next to his beautiful young actress wife, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), en route to a party at the Playboy Mansion. They look like the perfect swinging Sixties couple. He is dressed in a frilly shirt with big ruffled collars. Her blonde hair flows behind her in the breeze.

The film is set in 1969. Thanks to Rosemary’s Baby, released the year before, the Polish director is then among the most revered figures in the US industry. He and Tate are living in a house rented from Terry Melcher (Doris Day’s son) in Benedict Canyon. Tarantino imagines an alternative Hollywood history in which Rick is their next-door neighbour. Rick may be a fading star of macho TV westerns and jingoistic war movies but he regards Polanski with absolute adulation. For him, the diminutive European auteur in the natty clothes is “the hottest director in town... perhaps in the world”.

That, of course, is not at all how Polanski is regarded in Hollywood today. His films may have received multiple Oscar nominations (winning for The Pianist) and picked up big festival awards (including the Palme D’Or in Cannes) but he is still treated by many as a pariah. There is little sympathy for the tragedy he endured in 1969 when Charles Manson’s followers massacred the pregnant Tate.

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