Mia Farrow on the set of Rosemary’s Baby, 1968

Mia Farrow on the set of Rosemary’s Baby (1968, dir. Roman Polanski)

“[Polanski] had the idea that I should absentmindedly walk across the street into the moving traffic, not looking right or left.

‘Nobody will hit a pregnant woman,’ he laughed, referring to my padded stomach. He had to operate the hand-held camera

himself, since nobody else would. I took a deep breath. An almost giddy, euphoric feeling came over me. Together Roman

& I marched right in front of the oncoming cars - with Roman on the far side, so I would’ve been hit first.

‘There are 127 varieties of nuts,” he told a journalist. ‘Mia is 116 of them.’ I’ll take a compliment any way it comes.

I appeared in every single scene of the film, except when, during [the impregnated with Satan’s spawn sequence] a body

double was used in my place. But I didn’t entirely miss out on the scene - one day I found myself - me from convent

school, who prayed with outstretched arms in the predawn light - tied to the four corners of a bed, ringed by elderly,

chanting witches, while a perfect stranger with bad skin and vertical pupils was grinding away on top of me.

I didn’t dare think. After finishing that scene the actor climbed off me and said politely, in all seriousness,

‘Miss Farrow, I just want to say, it’s a real pleasure to have worked with you.’”

-excerpted from Mia Farrow’s What Falls Away