By MICHAEL GINGOLD
The actress who took on Lucio Fulci’s undead, and faced other perils in Italian genre cinema, has passed away.
On her Instagram page, Mia Farrow has revealed that her sister Tisa Farrow died in her sleep yesterday morning. The actress born Theresa Magdalena Farrow was 72. After making her film debut in the 1970 counterculture drama HOMER, Farrow had a number of supporting parts in both theatrical features and TV movies. Among the former were Alberto De Martino’s crime thriller STRANGE SHADOWS IN AN EMPTY ROOM (1976), starring Stuart Whitman, John Saxon and Martin Landau; James Toback’s intense debut feature FINGERS (1978) with Harvey Keitel; and Canadian genre specialist William Fruet’s actioner SEARCH AND DESTROY (1979). Her telefilms included THE INITIATION OF SARAH (1978), a sorority-set CARRIE derivative featuring Kay Lenz, Shelley Winters and Morgan Fairchild.
But Farrow’s best-known role was in ZOMBIE (a.k.a. ZOMBI 2, 1979), the Fulci film that launched the trend of post-DAWN OF THE DEAD ghoul movies. Farrow plays Anne Bowles, who joins reporter Peter West (Ian McCulloch) in traveling from New York to the tropical island of Matoul in search of her missing father. What they and another couple who join them discover is an ever-growing legion of the flesheating walking dead. The following year, she took the lead in Joe D’Amato’s ANTHROPOPHAGUS (first released in the U.S. as THE GRIM REAPER), once again visiting a remote island where she and others are terrorized by a disfigured cannibal (played by George Eastman, who scripted with D’Amato). Farrow’s final film was Antonio Margheriti’s 1980 Vietnam war adventure THE LAST HUNTER, opposite David Warbeck. She left the acting profession thereafter, but will forever be remembered fondly by fans of Italian fear fare. RIP, Tisa.
