diff --git a/Lib/tarfile.py b/Lib/tarfile.py
--- a/Lib/tarfile.py
+++ b/Lib/tarfile.py
@@ -454,6 +454,8 @@
                                             0)
         timestamp = struct.pack("<L", long(time.time()))
         self.__write("\037\213\010\010%s\002\377" % timestamp)
+        if type(self.name) is unicode:
+            self.name = self.name.encode("iso-8859-1", "replace")
         if self.name.endswith(".gz"):
             self.name = self.name[:-3]
         self.__write(self.name + NUL)