American actress and noted family, the third of seven kids of writer-director John Farrow and actress Maureen O’Sullivan. She had a bout with polio when she was nine, an experience that shaped her life from then on. Exiled to a ward in Los Angeles General Hospital, she lay on a bed among the suffering and dying. She recovered from the illness, but tragedy struck again four years later when her brother Michael died in a plane crash. Her parent’s marriage suffered under that blow. While O’Sullivan revived her stage career on Broadway, John Farrow quit working and drank heavily until 1963, when he died of a heart attack at 59.
Mia was 17 and in a convent school in England. The following year she left the school for New York where she began drama training. With one off-Broadway play under her belt, she took the role of a teenager in the TV series “Peyton Place.” The show became a major hit of the 1964 season, and the 19-year-old Mia, a star. Her third film, “Rosemary’s Baby,” was a mega success.
Before she had turned 20 she began an affair with 29-year-older Frank Sinatra. In the fall of 1964, when the press picked up on the unlikely romance between the sophisticated and debonair Sinatra and the skinny, awkward teenager, they documented every move. The couple married on 19 July 1966, Las Vegas, Nevada, for a year. Their odds were not great, with a difference in age, style and custom, conflicting careers and diametrically opposed temperaments, and by 1968, Mia took off for India to meditate with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Her spiritual quest was cut short when the guru wrapped her in his hairy arms one day during a private meditation. She returned in August 1968 to a divorce in Mexico.
Not long after, Farrow began a dalliance with the married conductor Andre Previn and had their twin sons on 26 February 1970. When his divorce came final they married on 10 September 1970. In the climate of military involvement in Asia, she and Previn decided to adopt a Vietnamese war orphan. In May 1973, their baby daughter Lark Song arrived at the Paris airport.
While filming “The Great Gatsby” in 1973, Farrow became pregnant with her third son, Fletcher. A second daughter, Daisy, arrived from Saigon in 1974. Three years later, the Previn’s adopted an older child who had been abandoned on the streets of Seoul, a little girl named Soon-Yi.
By 1978, the marriage had reached critical mass. Previn was steadily on tour, and Farrow was involved with the six kids. Separating from Previn, she took the kids with her to Manhattan the following year when she played in a Broadway production of “Romantic Comedy.” One night after a performance, her friend Michael Caine introduced her to Woody Allen, in 1978.
They went to museums, movies and the opera, walking together all through Manhattan, the city he loved. Allen lived in a penthouse on Fifth Avenue directly across Central Park from her apartment. She felt confident and happy in the beginning about the affair they began.
In September 1980, the kids met Allen, Matthew and Sascha, Soon-Yi, Lark, Daisy, Fletcher, and Moses, whom she had adopted earlier that year. They began to spend weekends at each other’s apartment, though he was uncomfortable parenting material and they never lived together as a full-time family couple. He tried, but made little connection with the kids. In 1985, they adopted Dylan and suddenly, for the first time, Woody loved a kid; the baby became central to his life. Their son Satchel was born on 19 December 1987. They also worked together fruitfully with 13 movies in their 12-year-relationship.
They began falling apart in 1989-1990, and had a huge, explosive break-up when Farrow found porno pictures in Allen’s apartment of her daughter Soon-Yi with Allen on 13 January 1992. Their split was official in August 1992, complete with bitter accusations and legal volleys.
By 1997, Farrow had a total of 14 kids, ten of whom were adopted. The family was centered in an eight bedroom house in Connecticut. Her autobiography, “What Falls Away” was published in 1997. In it, she reveals much of her life, writing candidly about the traumas and joys.
Farrow’s seventh adopted daughter was a blind Vietnamese orphan named Tam, believed to be ten years old when she arrived “malnourished, frightened, depressed and covered with lice.” A cheerful, playful girl, Tam died at home of cardiac arrest on 11 March 2000 following a week of treatment for a heart ailment.
Farrow’s daughter Lark Previn died at Brooklyn Hospital (NY) after a long illness (undisclosed but possibly related to AIDS since she had been treated previously for AIDS-related pneumonia) at age 35 on 25 December 2008. She had bee adopted by Farrow and Farrow’s then-husband Andre Previn in 1973.
In 2009 she went on a 21-day hunger strike to bring attention to the situation in Darfur. She terminated her strike on 6 May 2009, nine-days shy of her goal, on a physician’s advice about the effects on her health.
Six months after Farrow suffered the death of her daughter, her 66-year-old brother Patrick was found dead in his Vermont home on 16 June 2009. The cause was not immediately determined.
Link to Wikipedia biography