List Price: $1,249,900
Sale Price: $1,125,000
The Property: While she was in Chicago last year filming Public Enemies with Johnny Depp, the French actress Marion Cotillard rented this five-room, 2,500-square-foot condo on the fifth floor of an Old Town building.

How do we know? Not through any brazen feat of investigative reporting. A few months after Cotillard left town, the condo’s owner, Gabe Polsky, put the place up for sale, and the listing sheet that his real-estate agent distributed trumpeted that “Marion Cotillard rented while shooting a movie. . . . Johnny Depp (friend) also frequented the home.”

That information doesn’t seem to have sped up the pace of the sale: the condo was first listed in September 2008 and finally was sold last month, closing on July 23rd.

A Glencoe native now producing movies in Los Angeles, Polsky says that he was at first reluctant to announce the movie star connection. So why did he change his mind? “I know people are always attracted to that,” he says. “People are starry-eyed.”

Polsky, who is 30, is the son of the art gallery doyenne Maya Polsky and her ex-husband, Michael. He bought the condo on Old Town’s boutique- and restaurant-lined Wells Street in September 2003 for $790,000, according to information from the Cook County Recorder of Deeds. He had the place lavishly redecorated and “turned it from a three-bedroom into basically a one-bedroom,” as he puts it. (Here are pictures of the result.) “This was the kind of place that an artist or actress is going to appreciate right away,” he says.

Polsky lived in the condo full-time for only a short while before moving to Los Angeles. He then rented it out. Cotillard, whose agent could not be reached for comment, was in town while Public Enemies filmed in Chicago, Wisconsin, and Indiana from mid-March to late June 2008. Polsky says that the film company wanted to put her up in a hotel. “She dipped into her own pocket so she could live in a neighborhood,” Polsky explains.

The buyers are not yet identified in public records, but Polsky’s agent, Vince Scott, says that, as far as he knows, the Hollywood connection did not influence their decision.

Price Points: Polsky initially listed the property for $1,399,000, and later dropped the price by 10 percent, to $1,249,000. While the sale took a long time—in part because the unit is considerably more expensive than anything else in the building—Polsky isn’t complaining. “I’m glad I didn’t lose any money on it,” he says.

Listing Agent: Vince Scott, Sudler Sotheby’s, 312-757-1717; flyscotty@sbcglobal.net