Sharon Tate was tragically killed almost 50 years ago, and now the late actress can been seen in some rare candid, never-before-seen photos from right before her murder.
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As shared by PEOPLE, the photos were taken by photographer Terry O’Neill, who recently opened up about he time with Tate.
“She was expecting her first child,” he said of the star, whom he photographed in 1969 while she was pregnant. “She couldn’t wait to be a mother.”
O’Neill also shared that she had invited him to come to her home for a party when he visited Los Angles. “She was going back to America,” he recalled. “When I told her I was going too, she said ‘I’m having a party. Please come. And I said ‘I’d love to.’”
That party turned out to be a fateful night for Tate, and would have been for O’Neill as well.
“By the time I got into L.A, I was exhausted so I rang her up and I said, ‘Listen, Sharon, I can’t come tonight because I’m exhausted. I’ll see you next week,’” O’Neill added. “And that’s the night she got killed by the Mansons.”
“I was shocked to the core,” he said of when he got the news. “It was so horrible.”
In his new book, Terry O’Neill: Rare and Unseen, the photographer shares his memories of working with Tate and speaking highly of her personality oa beauty.
“That was Sharon Tate, naturally,” he said of a photo in which Tate posed topless but covered her cheat with her arm. “It was her idea. I don’t like shooting people naked. It’s not something I’m really into. I just let people do what they want.”
Tate was infamously murdered by The Manson Family during their night of terror in 1969, and in 2017 her younger sister, Debra, opened up about when her family first received the news of what happened, and how they could not comprehend how the killers were able to get so far as to murder an entire houseful of people.
“We just did not understand how somebody could walk into that house and get as far as they did without someone stopping them first, and to tell you the truth, to this very day that bothers me. It really does,” she said during an interview. “I was quite frankly a little doubtful, once again. These grungy, unorganized, hippy folk living off the land and out of garbage cans – it just didn’t make sense to me.”
Charles Manson himself — the leader of the cult — passed away in November 2017. He was 83 years old.
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