Mia Farrow becomes 80: “Rosemaries Baby”, Sinatra, Allen and scandals

You could see them again in December. And experience. A little welded, with straw long braids on the head, she played a woman disturbed after the divorce, who got a roommate for her large apartment, who shoveled a lesbian and funny life into her world. In the Booth Theater on New York’s Broadway, “The Roomate” was the name of the play and was a success. Because the audience laughed a lot and was probably also amazed at her, about Mia Farrow, who had been forgotten, could also be strange on stage.

This was also forgotten because Mia Farrow had become rare in public in recent years, “I am very good at doing nothing,” she said. But also because the amusing times and moments with her were rather rare and if so, then there were many years ago. And because it was so long ago and many may not know exactly why this woman, who is now 80 years old, was so important for film history. And in two parts, because otherwise you will not do justice to her, but also what she triggered.

Let’s start with the actress. Mia Farrow, born in Los Angeles in 1945 as the daughter of an Australian director and the Irish actress Maureen O’Sullivan, who became famous in the cinema as “Jane” at the side of Tarzan in the 1930s, grew up as a child in the film world of Hollywood,, Then wanted to become a nun for a moment, suffered from polio as a child, thought briefly that it was already with her life, but became healthy again, stood in front of a camera for the first time at the age of twelve and went to New York at the age of 18, to learn acting.

After a few appearances on New York’s theater stage, she played the role of Allison in the TV series “Peyton Place” in 1963 alongside the young Ryan O’Neill (“Love Story”), which was very successful and Farow to a young star in the USA. With its narrow stature and short hair, she was a kind of counter -draft to the image of women that determined divas like Marilyn Monroe or Jane Mansfield in the cinema. And she made another variety star. It was reported from those young years that she had a magnetic attraction, as a teenager she became a close girlfriend of the painter Salvador Dalí who gave her “a piece of the moon”. And in 1965, at 19, she met Frank Sinatra, the Crooner and Superstar, who reminded her of her father because he had the same shaving water in the bathroom. “I want a big career, a big man and a big life. You always have to think big, that’s the only way. I never want to be a nameless one,” she said in 1965.

Farrow and Sinatra married a year later, one of the most unusual marriages of Hollywood. But who only lasted two years when Farrow found that Sinatra had to drink, roar and not how to go to bed at eleven. In 1968 they separated, and Farrow made her most famous film “Rosemaries Baby”, a story about a young woman who is supposed to give birth to a child of the devil. Of all things, she, the Catholic.

Then she played in “The Great Gatsby” with Robert Redford, met the Beatles on a meditation trip to the Guru Maharishi Mahesch to India, which broke off everyone involved when the guru near Farrow tried sexual self -service. Then Farrow married the pianist André Previn, who divorced Farrow. But still sitting on the Ganges bank with the Beatles, she had decided to “look for a task that could breathe meaning to my life.”

Here we come to the second part of the history of Mia Farrow, which, even if she still made many films, built a second life around him, the life of the over-mother. With her second husband Previn she got three sons, and the couple adopted two Vietnamese and one Korean girl, who was then an eight-year-old Soon-Yi, who was later to play a decisive role. Farrow separated from Previn in 1979 and a little later came with the director Woody Allen, with whom she made eleven films until the early 1990s.

In 2022 everyone described in his memoirs that he found Farrow “incredibly beautiful”, but that he also overlooked certain alarm signals. Because Farrow became an almost manic mother of her children, explained her alternately and then over strict again. Seon-Yi reports years later about a childhood of punishments, strokes and being locked up. Farrow, it seemed, the family couldn’t be big enough. She adopted two children with all of them, and in 1987 her son Ronan was born, from whom Mia Farrow later indicated that he could also be the son of Frank Sinatra, with whom she stayed closely connected.

In the early 1990s there were 15 children in the Farrow/Allen family, who, however, lived outside of New York in Farrow’s country house. Mia Farrow not only wanted to be a good mother, but much more than that, she wanted to be a good, if not the best person. And she wanted to make the best people around her, the educational care should become “meaning”, and the family made Mia Farrow a wagon castle where fundamentalist cohesion was preached. And so it was that overlooked the first signals from the break.

Because Woody Allen had fallen in love with her, then adult adoptive subsidiary Soon-Yi, both met secretly in his New York apartment, and nude photos were created that Farrow found. Farrow -believed world exploded for the first time, and for the second time, when Woody Allen in the country house in Connecticut in 1992 allegedly “sexually attacked” and touched when playing. Woody Allen denied and denies the incident to this day, but Dylan Farrow, looked after and protected by Mia, remained in her presentation.

What followed at the time was an unprecedented ugly war of allegations and complaints, it came to interrogation, medical examinations, an expert opinion and even a lie detector test. And in the end to attend the procedure against everyone because the alleged act could never be proven. But peace was not. Farrow collected her children Dylan and, above all, her son Ronan, who have repeatedly repeated the allegations against everyone over the years and ensured that there were calls not to look at his films, no longer finished them and – directed to actors – no longer to work with everyone.

In his memoirs, everyone himself spoke in detail that Mia Farrow, in his opinion, manipulated her daughter about the statement and that there would be countless evidence that nothing had happened at the time. It was perhaps the most painful destruction of a family and thus also the damage to a cinematic life’s work, in which Mia Farrow was the loudest prosecutor, which was not in the house in the alleged act.

The last film that Farrow made with everyone in 1992 was called “husbands and wives”, after which she was still in 23 films, many of them for television, in front of the camera. However, she could never build on the acting success of her early years. And the family she built with her many children was also shaken by tragedies when two of the children committed suicide and one of AIDS died. And so today, her 80th birthday, Mia Farrow is back into two personalities. The one, the actress who stands with humor and great facial expressions on Broadway stages, and the other who did not leave the bitterness in the rubble field, “I wish I had never met him (everyone).” But today, as she says, found her peace. And as an actress, she said she could understand anyone who likes to work with everyone.