Mia Farrow, the actress who outlasted every story told about her

Mia Farrow

Photo: Andrew Lih / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 9, 1945 Los Angeles, California, United States
Occupation	Actress and humanitarian activist
Known for	Rosemary’s Baby, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Purple Rose of Cairo
Awards	Golden Globe · 2 David di Donatello · San Sebastián International Film Festival · National Board of Review

For most of her life, Mia Farrow has been described through other people. She was the very young wife of Frank Sinatra, the wife of André Previn, the leading lady of Woody Allen and then the central figure in the most bitter custody fight Hollywood has produced, while the performances were filed behind the headlines. Yet the woman who carried the slow dread of Rosemary’s Baby on her narrow shoulders kept working long after the tabloids moved on. When she finally returned to Broadway opposite Patti LuPone, the theater world did what the film industry never quite managed: it looked at the acting first, and handed her the first Tony nomination of her life.

She grew up inside the business, and it was never a gentle place. Her father, John Farrow, was an Australian-born director; her mother, Maureen O’Sullivan, was the Irish actress who played Jane in the Tarzan pictures. Maria de Lourdes Villiers Farrow was raised in a strict Catholic household in Beverly Hills, survived polio as a child and finished her schooling at convent schools in England and California. The stage found her almost by accident. Visiting her mother backstage on Broadway as a teenager, she went along with a friend to an audition for an off-Broadway production of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest and walked out with a part.

Television made her famous first. Farrow, born in Los Angeles on 9 February 1945, was nineteen when ABC’s Peyton Place cast her as Allison MacKenzie, the fragile daughter at the center of one of the first prime-time soaps, a role she played from 1964 to 1966. The Golden Globes named her New Star of the Year, and in July 1966, at 21, she married Frank Sinatra, who was 50.

The marriage ended on the set of Rosemary’s Baby. When Roman Polanski‘s 1968 adaptation of Ira Levin’s novel ran behind schedule, Sinatra wanted her to quit; she refused, and his lawyer served her divorce papers during the shoot. The performance she finished under that pressure is still the reason the film works: a pale, polite young wife in a Manhattan apartment slowly realizing that everyone around her, her husband included, has signed her body away. It brought her a David di Donatello award and BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations; the same year Joseph Losey paired her with Elizabeth Taylor in the colder Secret Ceremony.

The 1970s were an English decade. She married the conductor André Previn in 1970 and in 1971 joined the Royal Shakespeare Company, the first American actress to do so. Carol Reed’s Follow Me! won her the best actress prize at San Sebastián in 1972. Hollywood cast her as Daisy Buchanan opposite Robert Redford in The Great Gatsby in 1974 and as the vengeful Jacqueline in Death on the Nile in 1978. In 1979 she made her Broadway debut in Romantic Comedy opposite Anthony Perkins, the same year her marriage to Previn ended.

Then came the partnership that defined her screen career. Between 1980 and 1992 Farrow was Woody Allen’s companion and appeared in thirteen of his films, and the range he wrote for her is wider than the waif label suggests. For Broadway Danny Rose she gained weight and took on a hard Italian-American accent to play a mobster’s girlfriend in dark glasses. The Purple Rose of Cairo and Hannah and Her Sisters brought BAFTA nominations; Alice, in 1990, won her the National Board of Review’s best actress award, and she took a second David di Donatello for Crimes and Misdemeanors. The Academy never nominated her, then or later, and the omission says as much about how the industry read her as about the work itself.

The critical problem with the Farrow story is that it has rarely been allowed to be about her. In 1992 she discovered Allen’s relationship with Soon-Yi Previn, her adopted daughter, and months later Dylan, their seven-year-old adopted daughter, said Allen had abused her. Allen sued for custody and lost; in 1993 Judge Elliott Wilk refused him custody and visitation with Dylan, and a Connecticut prosecutor said there was probable cause but declined to press charges to spare the child a trial. Allen has always denied the allegation, and no charge was ever filed. The family split too: Moses Farrow has accused his mother of coaching the children, which his mother and his siblings Dylan and Ronan dispute. The HBO series Allen v. Farrow in 2021 told the story largely from her side, and Allen and Soon-Yi Previn declined to take part. For three decades almost everything written about Mia Farrow has become writing about that case, and the actress of Husbands and Wives, her last film with Allen, has been the casualty.

Her later screen work was sparse and chosen with an odd, dry wit. She played the satanic nanny Mrs. Baylock in the 2006 remake of The Omen and in 2022 joined Ryan Murphy‘s Netflix series The Watcher as the eccentric neighbor Pearl Winslow. Much of her energy went elsewhere. Appointed a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 2000, she made repeated trips to Darfur, co-wrote with Ronan Farrow the 2007 op-ed that branded the Beijing Games the “Genocide Olympics” and fasted on water for twelve days in 2009. Her memoir, What Falls Away, appeared in 1997.

The stage kept pulling her back. In 2014 she opened the Broadway revival of A. R. Gurney’s Love Letters opposite Brian Dennehy, a performance The New York Times called utterly extraordinary. A decade later came The Roommate, Jen Silverman’s two-hander directed by Jack O’Brien, which opened at the Booth Theatre on 12 September 2024. Farrow played Sharon, a reserved Iowa divorcée whose new lodger, LuPone’s Bronx grifter, draws her into small crimes. In 2025 it earned her a Tony nomination for best actress in a play at the age of eighty; the prize went to Sarah Snook. “I wanted to tell my mom,” she said of the news. “Of all the people in my life, she would’ve been the happiest.”

Her private life has been lived in unusual numbers. Farrow has raised fourteen children, four biological and ten adopted, among them the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ronan Farrow and the technology executive Fletcher Previn. Three have died: Tam in 2000, Lark in 2008 and Thaddeus in 2016. She still lives in Bridgewater, Connecticut, on the farm that sat at the heart of the 1992 case.

No new role has been announced since The Roommate closed. But Farrow, now eighty-one, has said plainly where she feels most herself: “I think I’m more comfortable on the stage.” After a career spent being explained by other people, the most interesting question left is the one Broadway reopened for her, and it concerns only her work: which play comes next.