Tisa Farrow, the actress who appeared in such 1970s films as James Toback’s Fingers and William Richert’s Winter Kills, has died, her sister Mia Farrow announced. She was 72.
She died unexpectedly on Wednesday, “apparently in her sleep,” Mia Farrow reported on Instagram.
“If there is a Heaven, undoubtedly my beautiful sister Tisa is being welcomed there,” she wrote. “She was the best of us — I have never met a more generous and loving person. She loved life & never complained. Ever.”
Her brother, John Farrow, told The Hollywood Reporter that she died in Rutland, Vermont.
Tisa Farrow made her onscreen debut in Homer (1970), portraying the girlfriend of a high school student (Don Scardino) deeply affected by the Vietnam War, and she also starred in the low-budget horror films Zombie (1979), directed by Lucio Fulci, and Anthropophagus (1980).
In her most prominent role, Farrow played a woman who has a kinky romance with a disturbed loner (Harvey Keitel) in writer-director Toback’s Fingers (1978). She then showed up as a nurse in the black comedy thriller Winter Kills (1979).
Farrow also had a walk-on part as a party guest in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979).
The youngest of seven kids, Theresa Magdalena Farrow was born in Los Angeles on July 22, 1951. Her mother was Irish actress Maureen O’Sullivan, best known as Jane in the 1930s Tarzan movies, and Australian director John Farrow (The Big Clock, Around the World in 80 Days).
She quit school while in the 11th grade and went on to work as a waitress in New York before deciding to pursue an acting career.
“I have no advantages,” Farrow told The New York Times in 1970. “I spent a long time going around town trying out for commercials, and I didn’t get one. I would always run into some career woman who disliked me right away because she didn’t like my sister Mia.”
After Homer, she appeared in the French-Italian-Canadian crime drama And Hope to Die (1972), starring Jean-Louis Trintignant.
Her credits also included Some Call It Loving (1973), Only God Knows (1974), Strange Shadows in an Empty Room (1976) and Search and Destroy (1979) and the telefilms The Ordeal of Patty Hearst and The Initiation of Sarah.
Farrow, who later became an ER nurse, was married to producer Terry Deane. A son she had with him, Jason, was on his second tour of duty with the U.S. Army when he died in Iraq in 2008.
In addition to Mia and John, survivors include her sisters, Prudence (the subject of the Beatles song “Dear Prudence”) and Stephanie; daughter Bridget; and grandson Kylor. Her two other brothers, Michael and Patrick, died in a plane crash in 1958 and by suicide in 2009, respectively.
Mia Farrow, of course, starred in several Allen movies and in Rosemary’s Baby and Peyton Place, among many other films.
