Wool trousers, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, $990. On Mia Farrow: Embroidered-wool jacket, Dior. “I don’t want to be sitting out in the street wrapped in my Eddie Bauer coat waiting to do a shot at two in the morning wishing I was home,” she says at her ELLE photo shoot this past August, exuding the same blend of magnetism and wide-open sensitivity she projects onscreen, whatever the character, a breeziness undergirded by steel. People have called her many things, in other words, but at this point, “lightweight” is unlikely to be one of them.įarrow’s most recent performance was in the 2014 Broadway production of Love Letters (the New York Times described her as “utterly extraordinary”). And in 2000, she was named a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador-she’s made 15 trips to Darfur and Chad to advocate for refugees. She has lived through one of the most acrimonious celebrity breakups in the history of celebrity. She’s had 14 children, four biological and 10 adopted, a fact some consider admirable and others hold up as evidence of an irresponsible savior complex. Nominated for nine Golden Globes, she’s won twice. In the decades since, Rosemary’s Baby has become a horror classic, and Farrow has acted in 40-plus more films, including almost every one that Woody Allen made in the ’80s, when they were a couple. “I was a lightweight-a Hollywood starlet on the verge of divorce.” “I was not a pediatrician in Southeast Asia, or a Carmelite nun in England,” she writes, mentioning two early aspirations. “But this is also true: it was a bit like an adoption that I had somehow messed up and it was awful when I was returned to the void.” Spirituality had also long been a focusing principle in her life, and she hoped that the Maharishi’s practice of Transcendental Meditation might help her find some peace. “I loved him truly,” she writes about Sinatra in her elegant 1997 memoir, What Falls Away.
She was trying to evade the tabloid superstorm that had erupted around her marriage, at 21, to Frank Sinatra, then 50, and continued through their breakup, almost two years later-Farrow received the divorce papers, with no advance notice, on the set of the movie she was filming at the time, Rosemary’s Baby. In 1968, Mia Farrow traveled to the foothills of the Himalayas with her sister Prudence to meditate with the guru Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.