MIA FARROW took centre stage at the High Court yesterday as she told how Roman Polanski’s overwhelming distress over the murder of his wife was “scalded” in her memory. The Hollywood actress went on to “swear on a stack of Bibles” that casual liaisons the director had with women after the murder in 1969 of Sharon Tate were for comfort alone and did not detract from his feelings for his late wife.

She said the bereaved film-maker, with whom she had just made the movie Rosemary’s Baby, was forced to leave a restaurant where they met for dinner and walk around the block for an hour.

“He was unable to talk about anything else,” she said. “He just kept saying over and over, ‘Why, why?’ and, ‘Who would have done this?’ It was a time before we knew who had done it. It was just inconceivable and we couldn’t figure it out. You couldn’t believe how the atmosphere was at the time.”

Miss Farrow, 60, former wife of Frank Sinatra, was two months’ pregnant at the time with her husband-to-be André Previn’s baby but did not tell Mr Polanski because she knew that his dead wife had been due to give birth within weeks.

The petite star of classics from Peyton Place to Hannah and Her Sisters, was giving evidence for Mr Polanski, 71, in his libel action against the publishers Condé Nast for an article in the glossy magazine Vanity Fair. It alleged that on the way to Miss Tate’s funeral in Los Angeles, Mr Polanski stopped off in New York and at Elaine’s Restaurant made sexual advances to a “Swedish beauty” , promising her, “I will make you the next Sharon Tate”.

The Polish-born director, who has been wanted in the United States since 1977 for having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old girl, has described a suggestion that he tried to exploit his wife’s memory in the seduction as an “abominable lie”.

Mr Polanski, who won an Oscar in 2003 for The Pianist, denies going to the New York restaurant until he met Miss Farrow by arrangement near the end of August 1969, two to three weeks after the murder of Miss Tate, 26, by the Charles Manson “family”.

Miss Farrow, wearing a black trouser suit and pale gold top, said she and Mr Polanski became friends after the filming of Rosemary’s Baby and that she also met his actress wife. She was in Florida when she heard of the murders and, on return to her home in Martha’s Vineyard, telephoned him, arranging a dinner meeting with him at Elaine’s.

“Our network of friends, we were keeping track of him and all of his friends tried to be with him to support him,” she said. Miss Farrow said that she arrived first and that while the two waited at the bar for a table, a couple of women tried to flirt with Mr Polanski.

“I remember because I remember thinking how inappropriate it was and then we sat at our table. He paid no attention to them. We hadn’t seen each other since Sharon’s murder and that was so huge. I think I might have been crying and was hugging him and he just brushed them off.”

Miss Farrow had earlier wept as she watched Mr Polanski giving evidence by video link from Paris where he lives. He is unable to testify in person because he fears he would be arrested and extradited to the US for unlawful sexual intercourse. Recalling the dinner, Miss Farrow said she could not remember if she and Mr Polanski had a table to themselves or had to share it with others.

What was scalded on her mind was the meeting and the conversation she had with him. She went on: “He had just returned from California and what had happened was foremost in his mind. He started telling me about events, what he had gone through and he got very, very upset. We had ordered our dinner, but we just left the restaurant.

“He was that upset, and I too. We just started walking around and around the block and he told me about visiting the house where Sharon had been killed, and the others, and a little kitten that Sharon had had and the kitten was still there in the blood.”

They returned to the restaurant, though neither could eat.

“I believe André showed up and then we left and my belief, to the best of my recollection, is that we brought Roman back to his hotel and then we went back to our hotel.” Questioned by John Kelsey-Fry, QC, for Mr Polanski, who asked her whether she had seen him behave inappropriately at the restaurant, she said: “No.”

Cross examined by Tom Shields, QC, for Condé Nast, she went on: “Of this I can be sure — of his frame of mind when we were at Elaine’s, of what we talked about, of his utter sense of loss, of despair and bewilderment, and shock and love, a love he had lost.”

The case continues.

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