Mia Farrow becomes 80: cult films and family dramas

Mia Farrows (80) Dazing Hollywood career is inseparable with her turbulent family life. As the daughter of a director and an actress, she came into contact with the big film business from her first day of life. Her father John Farrow (1904-1963) had made a name for herself as an Oscar-winning screenwriter and director of adventure and western films. The mother Maureen O’Sullivan (1911-1998) embodied the lightly dressed jungle beauty Jane between 1932 and 1942 in a total of six Tarzan films.

After her last appearance as Jane, the mother largely withdrew from the film business to take care of her children, from whom she gave birth to a remarkable seven. In the years after Mia Farrow’s birth on February 9, 1945, however, several hard blows were to overshadow the family idyll in Bel Air, a noble district in the northwest of Los Angeles.

In the summer of 1954, Mia Farrow fell ill with Polio at the age of nine and spent several months in an insulating station in a hospital. During the illness, she could no longer run at times, all of her personal things were burned in the parents’ house to prevent the virus from spreading further. In her memoirs, she was supposed to describe this traumatic experience later than the end of her childhood.

Another stroke of fate was the death of her eldest brother Michael (1939-1958), who died in 1958 in a plane crash. Five years later, Mia Farrow’s father John surprisingly succumbed to a heart attack at the age of 58. He was no longer granted his daughter’s start to her impressive film career.

Mia Farrow started her Hollywood career at the age of 19 in the war drama “Schüusen in Bantasi” (1965) alongside Oscar winner Richard Attenborough (1923-2014). However, between 1964 and 1966 it brought it to national celebrity with a role in the soap opera “Peyton Place”, which was persecuted by an audience in the United States. In 1965 she was given a golden Globe in the “Best Young Actress” category for this role.

When Farrow left the series in 1966, she had not only made a name for herself as an actress, but was also becoming one of the most coveted IT girls of her time. The fact that the eleven-like girl with the iconic pixie cut shortly afterwards married the three decades older world star Frank Sinatra (1915-1998) did not detract from her popularity.

Ultimately, it was Mia Farrow’s turn to more demanding roles, which this relationship, who was eagerly pursued by the gossip press, soon brought collapse. The legendary singer submitted the divorce at the end of 1967 when she refused to demolish the filming of Roman Polański’s (91) cult film “Rosemaries Baby” at his pressure. He had had the divorce papers delivered to her, and the marriage was canceled the following year.

After the gigantic success of the legendary horror classic, Mia Farrow had finally climbed into the highest league of Hollywood. In addition to her career, she devoted herself to building her own family with great passion. In 1970 she married the Oscar-winning composer André Previn (1929-2019), brought three sons to the world with him and also adopted two girls from Vietnam and a girl from South Korea. The latter is called SOON -YI PREVIN (today 54) – and should play a significant role in the further course of history.

During the 1970s, the acting mums appeared in numerous great cinema productions such as “The Great Gatsby” (1974), “A Wedding” (1978) or the Agatha-Christie film “death on the Nile” (1978) . At another summit of her career, she finally led her new relationship with the star director Woody Allen (89), which she received in 1980. Between 1980 and 1992 she was supposed to participate in a total of twelve masterpieces of directing, including today’s classics such as “A Summer Night sex comedy” (1982), “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985), “Radio Days” (1987) or ” Alice “(1990).

The last joint project from 1992 was called “husbands and wives”, a weird comedy in which the relationship crises New York couples are humorous. After the filming has been completed, Farrow’s relationship should also plunge into a deep crisis – and spectacularly breathe in front of the eyes of a global audience.

After Farrow had found nude photos of her adoptive daughter Soon-Yi Previn on all of the desk, an intimate relationship between the director and the then 21-year-old came to light. As part of the subsequent separation, there was a custody process of the three children together, which caused a sensation and has been reverberating to this day. At the time, one of the children involved included the son Ronan Farrow (37), whose biological father, according to stubborn speculation, may not be Woody Allen, but about Frank Sinatra. In addition, the children dylan (39) and Moses (47) adopted during the relationship.

Since allegations came on the table in the process that the star director had sexually passed on the seven-year-old adoptive daughter Dylan at the time (which he still denied today), his reputation was sustainably damaged. To this day, Woody Allen in Hollywood is largely considered a persona non grata, even if he continues to make films. With Soon-Yi Previn, he is still together to this day.

But for Mia Farrow, too, the publicly held sludge battle meant a serious setback in her film career. After being in the spotlight for years as a shining Hollywood star, she was almost exclusively seen in television productions or shallow cinema comedies such as “Miami Rhapsody-hot nights in Florida” (1995) in the following years.

As the actress repeatedly emphasized in later interviews, her focus was forced to raise her crowd of children after the separation from all for a long time, which she expanded to a total of 14 heads through five further adoptions in the 1990s.

It was only in 2006 that Mia Farrow celebrated a much-respected cinema comeback with a leading role in the remake of the horror classic “Das Omen”, which, however, did not follow any further major projects. Between 2011 and 2022, the once cheered superstar almost completely disappeared into the sinking and was particularly present on the New York Broadway stages. A happy reunion with the actress was finally available in 2022 in the Netflix mystery series “The Watcher”. In it she embodies a quirky old neighbor who mysteriously frightens a young family.