Who Sharon Tate was

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Sharon Tate was a siren. She lived the American dream, but it all ended abruptly, cruelly, when she was murdered just days before giving birth to her first child.

Born in 1943 in Dallas, she grew up constantly on the move due to her father’s military career. This nomadic life shaped her into a shy, reserved girl, often mistaken for aloof or snobbish. As she grew older, her striking beauty became impossible to overlook. She began entering beauty pageants and winning titles, though she claimed she wanted to become a psychiatrist.

At 17, another transfer took her family to Italy. There, during the filming of Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man, she was spotted among the extras and encouraged to try her luck in the entertainment industry.

Tate took on various TV roles, small film parts, and slowly began making her way into Hollywood. She met director Roman Polanski, they fell in love, and got married. Many saw her career as promising; at 25, she lived a joyful, glamorous life beside her husband, surrounded by an enviable social circle.

In August 1969, Sharon Tate was eight and a half months pregnant with Polanski’s son. At their Los Angeles home, she had two friends staying with her so she wouldn’t be alone while Polanski was in London for work. On the night of August 9th, 1969, around 12:30 AM, the house’s occupants, along with Tate’s former boyfriend, also a friend of the Polanskis, were brutally murdered by the Manson Family. The four victims were stabbed multiple times and died from their injuries. Tate herself suffered sixteen stab wounds, killing both her and her unborn baby.

The “Manson Family” consisted of roughly fifty members under the leadership of Charles Manson. Most were young women living communally in a makeshift camp, embracing a hippie lifestyle and heavy use of hallucinogens and other drugs. In the summer of ’69, they carried out a series of murders, including the Tate killings. The house where the crimes took place had previously been rented by a music producer who had refused to work with Manson. On August 9th, Manson ordered four of his followers to go to that house and kill anyone inside, telling them to make it as gruesome as possible.

The woman who stabbed Sharon Tate wrote the word “PIG” on the front door using Tate’s blood. She later admitted she kept stabbing her even as Tate begged for the life of her baby.

A photograph of Roman Polanski standing outside his home after the tragedy, became one of the defining images of that era.

Manson’s goal, disturbingly, was to ignite a social war that would empower his apocalyptic cult. His followers remained devoted for years, even after imprisonment. Later, seeking parole, they claimed they had acted under brainwashing and the influence of drugs, with no real awareness of their actions. The courts never believed them; most remain incarcerated or are long dead.

In Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood (2019), Quentin Tarantino revisited the events of that night, with Margot Robbie portraying the ill-fated beauty.