Haircolorist for Sharon Tate Still Working Today and Swiss Take Their Time About Polanski Extradition

Here is a lovely article mentioning Sharon Tate as an A-lister according to her former colorist Jo Hansford:

http://thescotsman.scotsman.com/fashion/Interview-Jo-Hansford-colourist.6252016.jp

Interview: Jo Hansford, colourist 

Published Date: 27 April 2010

By Ruth Walker

SCORES of A-listers, from models Elizabeth Hurley and Yasmin le Bon to domestic goddess Nigella Lawson and actress Natascha McElhone, wouldn't trust anyone else with their trademark tresses. Natalie Imbruglia is due an appointment any day now and Fearne Cotton was recently spotted with the stylist's products, having gone dramatically from blonde to brunette.

And though, as the First Lady of Colour, she commands a minimum of £400 for highlights – one woman even travels from Scotland every month rather than take her ahir elsewhere - Jo Hansford left school at 15 with no qualifications and even less idea about the world of hairdressing.

"I never intended to be a colourist," she says from her salon in Mayfair, pampered pooch Stella, a key member of the team, barking away in the background (she's been shut in another room to give her owner some peace but she's not very happy about it and is making her feelings known in no uncertain terms). "I'd never even been to a hairdresser because we had no money. I just wore my hair up in a ponytail."

In fact, the Londoner had set her heart on working as a make-up artist for television and had even won an apprenticeship at the BBC. But she needed to be 19, "and, as I left school at 15 because I hated it so much, I thought, 'What am I going to do for four years?'"

The BBC suggested she take up hairdressing, because she would need those skills for television as well, and the local careers office offered her a choice of two apprenticeships: one in Ealing, the other in Mayfair.

"I thought Mayfair sounded more interesting but I had no idea where it was," she laughs. "It was a massive salon next to Claridge's and my boss was this terrible old queen who made me cry every day. But he was a genius and he taught me so much. I hated the hairdressing – it was all backcombing and rollers in those days – but at one point I had to go into the back room and when I saw all the colours it was love at first sight. I never took up the apprenticeship with the BBC."

Still, there were no training courses so she had to teach herself as she went along. "My mother, bless her, lent me her front room and I used to get all the neighbours in. I had some terrible disasters. But it earned me pocket money and it taught me confidence."

When the salon closed in the late 1960s, she moved on to Vidal Sassoon, which is when her career really took off. "It was magic, working with the master. The energy, the adrenaline, it was amazing. I never wanted to leave. Everybody came to Sassoon: Vanessa Redgrave, Catherine Deneuve, Sharon Tate. I did a lot of film work too – David Hemmings and Richard Burton. And Tony Richardson – once he clocked on to me, he would always ask me to work on his films, which was a great compliment."

But with all those big heads in one room, didn't things ever get a bit – er – hair-raising? "Only the C-lists have demands," she insists.

"All the A-list are lovely – they're very professional, grounded, unpretentious. It's no big deal. It's all the Bs and Cs who think they're amazing. They're a pain in the bum, really. In fact, I've had to get rid of a couple of people. I just said, 'I'm sorry I cannot do this any more.' It's not worth it."

However, even after 40 years in the business, she still relishes a challenge. "I had a lovely girl who came in with very thick, long brown hair with a fringe and she said, 'I want to look like Bree from Desperate Housewives.' I was like, 'Yes! Fantastic!' I couldn't believe my luck."

But those who want to bring a touch of drama to their hair this year might be disappointed. "More solid colour is coming into force this year, rather than great chunks of streaks," says Hansford. "It's all about shine, condition, grooming. Cuts are as important as colour, but this season it's really nice, sharp haircuts – lots of bobs, and the fringe is back in again too."

Due to popular demand, she has launched her own range of hair products, the latest of which is a leave-in spray conditioner, which will be on the shelves next month. "If you put volumising shampoo on your hair then put conditioner on it, you're flattening it all down and destroying the effect," she says. "But with this, you just spray round the edges, comb it through and leave it."

The range has met with high praise indeed. "We had an e-mail saying Sienna Miller loves it. Hurley loves it, even Camilla loves it. That makes me feel confident."

Jo Hansford hair products are available at Harvey Nichols and John Lewis and online at

http://www.johansford.com/

I think it's great that--out of all the Hollywood people--she could have listed she listed Sharon among Deneuve and Redgrave!  True A-listers!

And more news on Polanski:

http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory?id=10476948

Raquel Welch and Sharon Tate Friends? When Is the New Tate Biography to be Released? And Sharon has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame???

According to Kirk Crivello 's book, "Fallen Angels" he writes that when Sharon was making "The Sandpiper" :  Sharon became friendly with the girl who photo-doubled Elizabeth Taylor in the beach sequences.  Her name was Raquel Welch.

Taylor was jealous of Sharon from the start and had Tate's scenes cut from the film.  I have also heard a rumor that one of the reasons Taylor did not want Sharon around was because of Burton's promiscuous behavior.  Had Burton got a good look at Sharon, would she have been competition for Taylor's man?  Could be?  Welch herself has recently confessed to having an attraction for Burton and this article shows that Burton was certainly a ladies man :

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wales-news/2010/04/01/raquel-welch-reveals-her-passion-for-richard-burton-91466-26154509/

Raquel Welch reveals her passion for Richard Burton

By Robin Turner

SHE was the beauty who burst from her cave woman brassiere to become an American sex symbol.

He was the brooding, working-class Welshman who became one of Hollywood’s most glamorous stars.

Now, 69-year-old big-screen veteran Raquel Welch has hinted she and Richard Burton could have been more than just friends on the set of their 1972 movie Bluebeard.

Welch – born Jo Raquel Tejada in Chicago, Illinois – appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show in the US this week to talk about her new memoir Raquel Welch: Beyond the Cleavage (£12.99 Weinstein Book, released in the USA today and available in the UK soon).

She told the chat show host about some of the leading men she had dated and known including Elvis Presley, Bob Dylan, Dean Martin, Burt Reynolds and Richard Burton. Welch wrote of Burton (born Richard Jenkins in Pontrhydyfen, Port Talbot): “He’s like a heat-seeking missile, a smoking hot romantic.”

Oprah Winfrey repeated the line then asked: “Who were you talking about there?”

Welch confirmed:“I was talking about Richard Burton, who I did a movie with in Budapest. He was just so charismatic and just really something.”

When Welch admitted to spending time with Burton while they filmed Bluebeard Oprah Winfrey said with raised eyebrows: “Spending time with, I love that expression.”

Raquel Welch’s career as a sex symbol really took off after her scantily-clad appearance in the 1966 box office hit One Million Years BC.

Her marriage to former manager Patrick Curtis was just about over when she started filming Bluebeard in 1972 and she would divorce Curtis later that year. Her leading man, Richard Burton, playing a murderous World War I era German aristocrat, who had a reputation for flirting with his leading ladies.

His Henry VIII film with Genevieve Bujold was known in the acting circles as “Anne of a Thousand Lays”.

And former film publicist Michael Munn said in his book on Burton, Prince Of Players, that the Welshman had flings with Marilyn Monroe, Jean Simmons, Lana Turner, Claire Bloom and Susan Strasberg.

“I was like a hungry bear with salmon jumping into my paws, Sybil (his first wife) was incredibly tolerant,” Munn claimed he told him.

Raquel Welch said of Bluebeard, in which she played a former nun: “I gave up my habit for Richard Burton. My nun had some rather libidinous leanings, she was kind of a sexpot underneath.”

Until now, Welch has never hinted at any romance with the late Welsh actor, who at the time of the movie was also going through marital problems. Like Welch, Burton would also get divorced that year when he finalised his first split from Elizabeth Taylor.

Author and journalist Penny Junor, who has written a biography of Burton, said: “I think any affair that Burton might have had is credible. He was very promiscuous.

“He had an awful lot of women in his time. He made it a rule to try to conquer any leading lady that he had in the early days. The reason he ended up with Elizabeth Taylor was that she had a similar rule that she would only sleep with men she married.”

Swansea-born author Paul Ferris who also wrote a Burton biography, yesterday thurs said yesterday: “I did not know of any liaison with Raquel Welch when I wrote my book but his family, who helped with the biography, were understandably protective of him at the time because he was still alive and they were very fond of him. But it would not come as a surprise if there was a romance there as he was very attractive to women and I’m pretty sure he’d have been attracted to someone like Raquel Welch.”

Joan Collins wrote in her memoir that when she rejected Burton’s on-set advances, he embarked on a series of liaisons with other women including workers on the set. Collins playfully told Burton that she believed he would sleep with a snake if he had the chance, to which Burton is alleged to have replied “only if it was wearing a skirt, darling”.

Burton was born in 1925, the 12th child of a miner. His home in Pontrhydyfen was so crowded he was farmed out to relatives in Taibach, Port Talbot, where he grew up.

Though he made his name on the London stage as a brilliant young actor, Burton became an international star as much for his marriages to Elizabeth Taylor as his movies.

Replete with yachts, jewels and drunken fights, the Burton-Taylor alliance was even condemned by the Vatican for “erotic vagrancy”.

Burton, a heavy drinker who smoked five packets of cigarettes a day, died in 1984 aged 54.

He was buried in Celigny, Switzerland with a copy of Dylan Thomas’s poems.

In her book Raquel Welch: Beyond The Cleavage, the star reflects on her life from growing up in California and bursting onto the scene in One Million BC to a failed marriage to becoming a single mother and, at last, becoming a famous actress.

She starts the book by saying: “Contrary to popular opinion I did not hatch out of an eagle’s nest, circa One Million Years BC clad in a doeskin bikini.

“In fact, I was more surprised than anyone to find myself on location in such an exotic setting, high atop a volcanic mountain in the Canary Islands.”

“With the release of that famous movie poster, in one fell swoop, everything in my life changed and everything about the real me was swept away. All else would be eclipsed by this bigger-than-life sex symbol.”

Now separated from her fourth husband, Welch made a string of movies after Bluebeard including the Three Musketeers and the Four Muskaeteers, Bedazzled, Legally Blonde and Forget About It.

Also, here is an interesting interview with Welch on her new book:

http://entertainment.msn.com/video/?g=6f4fb1a4-bd82-4456-99f6-6e75d15046d6&from=en-us_msnhp>1=28101

A fairly recent photo of author Sanders.

According to Amazon, the biography of Sharon by "The Family" writer Ed Sanders is due out February 5, 2011.  So be on the lookout for that one.  It is officially titled: Sharon Tate: The Biography.  Let's hope it is a good one for those of us who can't get enough Sharon. ;)

And even though this is an interesting article on Sharon, it says at the bottom that she did receive a Star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame?  News to me?  Although, of course, she certainly deserves it.

http://www.hollywoodusa.co.uk/HolyCrossObituaries/sharontate.htm

Photo of the Week, More Magnificient Matondang Art and Polanski News

Photo of the Week:

Classy Black and White photo of Sharon taken by Terry O'Neill.

Kerstien Matondang has created more beautiful art for Sharon.

I recall Sharon saying she had a teddy bear she still kept as an adult that she had had as a child.

Please look at her site here:  http://kerstien.se/sharoninart.htm

More On Polanski:

From The Times:

January 16, 2010

Los Angeles court to hear Roman Polanski’s plea to be tried in absentia
 
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/europe/article6990371.ece

It is not Alcatraz, nor Robben Island, and Roman Polanski is not singing Jailhouse Rock. The film director’s current prison, the chalet Milky Way, looks out on to his favourite ski slopes on the Eggli mountain and, even if you close the window, you can hear the church bells from down the valley.

“We miss him — he’s always cheerful,” said the owner of the bakery where Polanski used to buy his croissants. Now his electronic foot tag would sound the alarm if he left his golden cage and strayed down the hill for breakfast.

The 76-year-old film-maker, officially a fugitive from American justice, has been in and out of Switzerland for 30 years and was treated as a welcome celebrity before suddenly being arrested by the Swiss authorities in what was seen by many as an attempt to curry favour with the United States.

On Friday, a Los Angeles court will consider Polanski’s plea to be tried in absentia. If granted, it will allow his lawyers to explain in detail the reasons why he fled the US in 1978 while awaiting sentencing for the sexual abuse of a 13-year-old girl — and negate any need to extradite him.

In the meantime, warns Roger Seifriz, the head of tourism in the region, the locals should stop talking to the press about Polanski. “Is it correct to answer all journalist questions?” he asked in an open letter to the people of Gstaad. “Or would it be more appropriate to think twice and then reply: ‘I’m sorry, I can’t speak about it’?”
 
Mr Seifriz is plainly worried not just about Polanski’s privacy, but also about scaring away Gstaad’s remaining publicity-shy celebrities. The village has got the message and has, for the most part, closed ranks.
 
Three tribes inhabit Gstaad. The first are locals; the second, the well-off tourists, many from Russia, who ski, shop, eat expensively and then go home. The third is the chalet tribe.

“Stick around until midnight — that’s when they come out,” says Andrea Scherz, the owner of the Palace Hotel, which looms over Gstaad like Kafka’s Castle.


Sure enough, the huge lobby, with its crackling wood fire, antlers, deep, foetal chairs and backgammon boards, is the social hub of the chalet world.

“They come to see and be seen,” says Mr Scherz, whose grandfather bought the place after the war. He persuaded Louis Armstrong to play in the lobby, and brought in crooners such as Maurice Chevalier.

The most expensive chalets, which sell for as much as €7 million (£6 million), are in the Oberbort district of Gstaad, close enough to the Palace to make it into a second living room.

There the crowd swells and ebbs as in a railway terminus: the half-brother of Osama bin Laden; the Formula One boss Bernie Ecclestone (who owns a hotel on the Gstaad Promenade); the dress designer Valentino (watch out for his liveried servant walking the dogs); assorted racing drivers and, naturally, legions of beautiful young women.

Polanski admits to having schoolgirls around to the chalet after the murder of his wife, Sharon Tate, in 1969. “Kathy, Madeleine, Sylvia and others whose names I forget played a fleeting but therapeutic role in my life,” he wrote in his memoirs. “They were all between 16 and 19 years old . . .”

The chalet community is divided about him. Some dinner hostesses refuse to have his name mentioned at table, others see him as a relic of the 1970s, when nasty Los Angeles vices were imported to the valley.

In the old days, Gstaad was the hangout for British Hollywood: David Niven (who is buried just down the valley), Peter Sellars, Richard Burton, Joan Collins, even Julie Andrews. Polanski, by contrast, brought Jack Nicholson to the place: an altogether different kettle of fish.

The Gstaad super-rich are, though, mostly forgiving of the delinquent director. It is a place where people can afford to be politically incorrect.

“He works hard, plays hard,” says a backgammon player in the Palace. “They should leave him alone.”

Walter Chappell, Sharon Tate & Big Sur Plus: Sharon 's voice dubbed for Eye of the Devil? and More

"W Magazine" - August 2001



Tate Gallery by Julie L. Belcove

Walter Chappell photographed Sharon Tate in Big Sur 37 years ago. The portrait series has never before been published, but it still astounds today.

One photo is cropped close, revealing a large eye rimmed in thick liquid liner gazing out from a mass of tangled, teased blond hair. In another shot, sunlight floods the room, kissing the blonde's reedy body and delicate features and setting a vase of dandelions aglow In yet another picture, the woman, dressed in a caftan, is seen from the other side of a window, her palms pressed together over her head in a quasi-Eastern-meditative pose. The images are pure Sixties. For its aesthetic value alone, the series, shot by a photographer named Walter Chappell over the course of two or three days in Big Sur, California, in 1964 and never before published, is a rare find.

But look more closely. The stunning blonde is Sharon Tate. Now the photographs take on a power of a different dimension, for if any photograph captures a single moment in time, these freeze Tate as she has already been frozen by fate: The archetypal tragic heroine who will be forever young, forever on the cusp of stardom. Would we be mesmerized by these photos if Tate were alive and well and living in the Hollywood Hills, a long retired B-movie starlet pushing 60 and going on her third facelift? Quite frankly, no. For what defines Tate as an icon is her death. And not just the fact of it—that she died young and beautiful and eight months pregnant—but the very brutality of it, that she was stabbed repeatedly by members of Charles Manson's "Family" on a rampage that terrorized Hollywood in the summer of ‘69.

In September Chappell's photographs of Tate will be exhibited for the first time, as the inaugural show of the Roth Horowitz Anderson gallery on Melrose Place in Los Angeles. Dealer Andrew Roth has been determined to put the work on display since he met Chappell more than two years ago. Chappell was a onetime student of Minor White, who founded the photography journal Aperture. Though known and respected by other photographers, Chappell worked in relative obscurity for most of his life, which came to an end after 75 years last summer.

Roth was interested in Chappell's work, and the photographer Adam Fuss, a mutual friend, offered to make an introduction. The two flew to New Mexico in July of 1999 and drove to Chappell's remote homestead. Fuss had warned Roth about the elder photographer's unusual lifestyle, but the dealer was startled nonetheless when Chappell greeted them completely naked. "He was a very tall guy," recalls Roth. "He had long white hair, like an old hippie. The flesh was just sort of hanging on his skeleton—he was at that age. And he had a big, sort of woman's butt, kind of funny, and the only thing he wore were these cock rings, and little slippers when he went out into the woods."

Linda Piedra, Chappell's companion of the last several years and a fellow nudist, says in a telephone conversation that he loved being without clothes from the time he was a child but that it was during his stint in the Army, when he was placed in solitary confinement at the age of 19, naked, with only a blanket, that he discovered "the altered states of consciousness that are possible to achieve directly through the skin."

The altered states Chappell sought were natural, not chemically induced. A resolute hippie, he preferred meditation, during which he frequently made self-portraits in, as Piedra delicately puts it, "varying states of his lingam." (One photo, Father and Son, 1962, shows a seated Chappell nude, erect and holding his toddler child. The picture was confiscated in California and again in Maine and made the subject of obscenity trials, both of which prosecutors lost. Another photograph from the same period is a close-up of his wife's vagina just after childbirth.) When Chappell lived in environments that were not conducive to nudity, such as Rochester, New York, where he served as curator of the George Eastman House for a brief time, he wore clothes. But during winter, Piedra says, "every morning Walter would take off his clothes and dive into the snow and have a snow bath."

For four days Roth, Fuss, Chappell and Piedra looked through the photographer's archives. All but a few dozen of his negatives and prints made prior to 1961 were destroyed in a fire that year. Still, Roth was easily able to put together a show of Chappell's vintage prints for his Upper East Side gallery, Roth Horowitz, which ran last year. (Though a European collector bought several of the Chappells, Roth calls the works "hard sells.") Toward the end of his visit, Roth asked if there was anything else left to see. "I turned to Walter," Piedra recalls, "and said, ‘Well, there are the pictures of Sharon. Would it be all right?'"

"I guess so," was Chappell's reply.

For 35 years Chappell had guarded his photographs of Tate as if he were protecting Tate herself. The two, photographer and subject, had formed a bond in Big Sur in 1964, which for Chappell outlasted Tate's death. Instead of cashing in on the public fascination with her gruesome demise, he put the photos in a box and showed them to almost no one.

Despite Chappell's obvious unease with the commercial world, the photographs were taken for purely commercial reasons. To pay the bills, Chappell occasionally accepted assignments in Hollywood. He made early head shots (circa 1968) of Harrison Ford and photographed Dennis Hopper while he was editing Easy Rider In 1964 he was working as a still photographer on the set of The Sandpiper, with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. Tate, then 21, had an uncredited, bit part, and the movie's producer, Martin Ransohoff, who had signed her to a contract and was determined to make her a star, hired Chappell to shoot a publicity portfolio for her. (Ransohoff, reached in Beverly Hills, says he does not recall the details of the deal.)

Tate had won her first beauty contest at the age of six months. An Army brat, she had finished high school in Verona, Italy, where she was hired as an extra on the set of Barabbas. Even amid the masses in the swords-and-sandals movie, her jaw-dropping beauty stood out. Soon the actors, including Jack Palance, became rivals in her pursuit. The actor Richard Beymer, who made another movie in Verona, gave her his agent's card, and when her family moved to San Pedro, California, at the end of 1961, she used it. Tate made one commercial for cigars, another for Chevrolet.

Eventually, she came to see Ransohoff, then the powerful head of Filmways Inc. "She was just absolutely gorgeous," Ransohoff gushes. One look at these pictures, and it's easy to believe him—but how many equally beautiful girls, prom queens and cheerleaders all, have come and gone in Hollywood?

When Tate arrived for her shoot with Chappell, they made an instant connection, according to Piedra, who, though not around at the time, is the repository for all things Chappell. "It was very immediate," says Piedra, her voice gentle and serene. "Something about her, from what Walter said, was tender and sweet. He had an immediate response of love and even concern for her. In making those pictures, they established a rapport she'd never had with a photographer before. He even got her to take off her clothes." (She isn't certain whether Chappell, too, removed his clothes.) Chappell thought the pictures revealed not just her surface beauty, but "evidence of deeper qualities in her."

"My sense is that Walter loved her—not an erotic love, but a gentle, lasting love," adds Piedra, who shared his belief in the teachings of a philosopher and spiritual leader named Gurdjieff. "We all have a connection together because we all inhabit the earth together."

After the photographs were made, Ransohoff demanded that Chappell turn over the chromes, or negatives, Piedra says. Chappell refused. Possibly in anger, Ransohoff never used the photos, extraordinary as they are. Chappell made just three editions of the full portfolio, says Roth: One for the film company, another that is now in the possession of Roman Polanski and the one that will be on view at Roth Horowitz Anderson. (The photographs will be priced from $5,000 to $15,000 for individual prints and $70,000 to $90,000 for a single portfolio of 14 images.)

In the five years that followed the Big Sur shoot, Tate met Polanski when he cast her—bowing to pressure from executive producer Ransohoff—in The Fearless Vampire Killers. Reported hostility between director and star quickly turned to passion, and in 1968 the couple married. Tate wore a mini. Despite her indisputable beauty, her career never really did take off, though Valley of the Dolls did well at the box office in 1967. Around that time, Ransohoff recalls, she asked to be released from her contract. "She told me she really wanted to have kids and didn't want to continue her movie career," he says, having obliged her request.

Piedra is not certain how closely Chappell and Tate kept in touch, but at least two pieces of correspondence survive: a letter Tate wrote in November 1964 asking for some prints, and his response, which ended, "I hope you are lovelier than ever, as you have every possibility always to be." In February 1969, shortly after Tate learned she was pregnant, she called Chappell and asked him to photograph her again. "She very much wanted to show her happiness with her life and this baby she was carrying," Piedra says. "She wanted pictures to mark this particular passage in her life."

Chappell obliged, but there's not much to the photographs. Roth puts the onus on Tate. "It's like she's turning into a star, and she's posing," he says. "She's controlling how she wants to be seen, so he couldn't make good pictures."

Within a few days of her murder, Hollywood was rereleasing her movies. The myth-making machine had been fired up.

Thirty-two years later, after much wrestling with the issue, Chappell's six children and other survivors, including Piedra, agreed to let Roth exhibit and sell the photos. Roth admits Chappell never would have sold them. "What it represents to some degree is letting go," says Piedra, who considers the work "a physical vestige of Walter."

 "Whatever took place between Walter and Sharon Tate," she adds, "and whatever remorse or sadness he felt after Sharon's death, those facts have been purified through death."

Note: Some of the above photos are not in the actual W magazine but are known photographs taken by Chappell. 

Additional Note:  Do not use any images without permission from Chappell's children.  They now own the rights to these.  (So No Ebay copying!)

There is a blog claiming that Sharon's voice was dubbed in Eye of the Devil ???  I thought she had a voice coach on this and did it herself?

http://goremasterfx.wordpress.com/2009/12/06/eye-of-the-devil-released-december-6-1967/

Polanski now at his chalet:

http://indonesia-shared.blogspot.com/2009/12/roman-polanski-shows-his-face-from.html

A full profile of Roman Polanski:

http://indonesia-shared.blogspot.com/2009/12/roman-polanski-personal-fact-birth-name.html