While living in Italy, where her father worked as a military officer, she and some friends got parts as extras in the film Hemingway’s Adventures of a Young Man, during which actor Richard Beymer (later to star as Ben Horne in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks) noticed her. Tate’s start in movies was, unsurprisingly, spawned by her striking looks. Easily Tarantino’s most melancholy and humane film since Jackie Brown, it presents Tate as someone to be remembered not for the way she disappeared, but for her life as a young woman trying to find both happiness and artistic fulfilment in an environment where her unusual beauty (even by Hollywood’s extreme standards) made her both a hot commodity and uniquely vulnerable.ĭon’t Think Twice, It’s All Right: On ‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood’ Why We Keep Coming Back to the Manson Family The ‘Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood’ Exit Survey The casting of Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, billed in advance as a key character, also brewed anxiety over whether Tarantino, not always the best writer of female roles, would lean into the particularly gruesome death of Roman Polanski’s then-wife.Īs it turns out, Tarantino’s cinephilic instincts took precedence over his bloodthirst: Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood focuses on Tate’s acting aspirations and her burgeoning recognition as a promising new talent at the time of her death, rather than the death itself-a tragedy that doesn’t even happen on screen. When it was announced that Quentin Tarantino was working on a film centered on the Charles Manson murders that shook the Los Angeles elite in the summer of 1969, some filmgoers (myself included) worried that the director’s taste for extreme violence would be applied to these atrocious real-life events.

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