The white door I’m pictured here in front of in Thurloe Place Mews, SW7, once belonged to Roman Polanski. My photographer lived next door and I had some of my first shoots in his studio there. He lived in tiny mews house behind the door in the 1960’s. While there he made Repulsion. Here’s a little something about the film.
Set in a bleakly grey London, Roman Polanski’s brilliant, cold and terrifying case history sees sexually repressed and mystifyingly psychotic Carole Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve) killing off predatory males, while well-heeled South Kensington has never appeared so unsettling.
Repulsion is famously set around London’s prestigious South Kensington district, SW7. The pretty vacant, and increasingly distracted, Carole works as a beautician at ‘Madame Denise’s beauty parlour’. Amazingly, over 40 years later, it’s still a beauty salon, Thurloe’s, 31 Thurloe Place, South Kensington, SW1.
Still thriving, too, a couple of doors away is the Hoop and Toy, 34 Thurloe Place, the pub where wannabe-boyfriend Colin (John Fraser) drinks with his appalling cronies.
He takes Carole for fish and chips at Dino’s, an Italian restaurant which stood at 1 Pelham Street, alongside South Kensington tube station. After remaining virtually unchanged for nearly 50 years, Dino’s finally succumbed to updating and now lives on as Muriel’s big Kitchen.
