TISA FARROW
(22 July 1951 - 10 January 2024)
The American actress and model Tisa Farrow, who was the younger sister of Mia Farrow, has died in Rutland, Vermont, aged 72. She did not have an exceptional career like her sister, and only worked in films from 1970 to 1980. Her parents were the actress Maureen O’Sullivan, famous for playing Jane to Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan, and writer-director John Farrow, who worked on nearly eighty films. Tisa Farrow was born Theresa Magdalena Farrow in Los Angeles, the youngest of seven children. She attended the prestigious New Lincoln School in New York but never completed her education. Instead, she left in the eleventh grade and worked as a waitress while trying to get into commercials, but to no avail.
Tisa made her first film in 1970, the Canadian-American drama Homer, about a high school hippie who felt displaced in a society that upheld the Vietnam War. It starred Don Scardino and Alex Nicol, with Tisa Farrow as the hero’s girlfriend. It was not a success. And Hope to Die – aka La course du lievre a travers les champs – was René Clément’s drama about a crook on the run who joins a gang for a kidnapping job. It starred Jean-Louis Trintignant, Robert Ryan and Aldo Ray, with Tisa Farrow as the sister of one of the gang. It was cut on release and made little impact. Some Call It Loving saw Farrow as an innocent girl in a fantasy game of love and death. James B. Harris directed with a cast including Carol White and Richard Pryor.
After that, Farrow was in Only God Knows, about a drugs facility that stages its own robbery, while Strange Shadows in an Empty Room was an Italian crime drama shot in Canada in 1976, starring Stuart Whitman as a man looking for his sister’s killer. The cast also included John Saxon, Martin Landau and Gayle Hunnicutt, but the results were confusing and it was released under different titles, such as Blazing Magnum in the UK. Fingers with Harvey Keitel as a debt collector who falls for a woman played by Farrow was directed by James Toback (who really wanted Robert DeNiro in the lead). The film was remade in France in 2015 as The Beat That My Heart Skipped.
Tisa Farrow continued to be cast in unconventional pictures such as Search and Destroy, about a serial killer of Vietnam vets, Zombie, Lucio Fulci’s horror about an undead epidemic, and Anthropophagus, Joe D’Amato’s Italian horror film on cannibalism. In 1980 The Last Hunter, set during the Vietnam war, was Farrow’s last film. In 1979 she had had a cameo role as a party guest in Woody Allen’s Manhattan, and was a nurse in Winter Kills, William Richert’s thriller about a Kennedy-type assassination conspiracy theory. Apart from a couple of TV movies, that was the total film career of Tisa Farrow. In 1973 she had appeared semi-nude in Playboy but it didn’t do much for her career. She was married to the producer Terry Deane, with whom she had two children. Their son, Jason, a sergeant in the US army, died in Iraq in 2008.
MICHAEL DARVELL