Los Angeles, California · Born 1945

MiaFarrow

The Los Angeles actress who played Rosemary and Daisy and Hannah and Cecilia and Judy across five decades of film, who collaborated with Woody Allen across fourteen films and thirteen years, and who has spent equal time as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador and humanitarian advocate — the public life as deliberately chosen as the films.

14
Woody Allen
Films
1
Golden Globe
Won
14
Biological and
Adopted Children
Mia FarrowPortrait · Mia Farrow
Biography

From Peyton Place to Rosemary's Apartment

Born Maria de Lourdes Villiers Farrow on February 9, 1945, in Los Angeles — the daughter of director John Farrow and actress Maureen O'Sullivan, raised in a large Catholic family with a brother who had polio and a childhood shaped by a serious bout of polio herself at nine. She was acting professionally at nineteen, cast in the television soap opera Peyton Place in 1964, before her film career began.

Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby (1968) — Farrow as Rosemary Woodhouse, the young wife who suspects the neighbours have made a pact involving her unborn child — is the performance that established her: the specific quality of her presence, the vulnerability without weakness, the intelligence that makes the horror credible by making Rosemary's disbelief of her own perception fully comprehensible. Polanski had to persuade Frank Sinatra, to whom she was married, to allow her to remain on the production; she stayed.

The thirteen-year collaboration with Woody Allen produced fourteen films across the full range of what he was capable of: Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985), Broadway Danny Rose (1984), Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989). She received Golden Globe nominations for several; her work in Purple Rose of Cairo is among the finest of her career and the decade. The collaboration ended acrimoniously in 1992.

She became a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 2000 and has devoted significant time to advocacy for the people of Darfur, publishing extensively in major newspapers and speaking before the United Nations. The humanitarian commitment is not peripheral to her public identity; it has occupied as much of her adult life as the acting career and has been pursued with equal discipline.

1945
Born in Los Angeles; John Farrow's daughter; polio at nine; performing at nineteen
1964
Peyton Place on television; the career beginning; Sinatra marriage
1968
Rosemary's Baby — Polanski; the horror made credible by her intelligence
1974
The Great Gatsby — Daisy Buchanan; Jack Clayton; Robert Redford
1982–1992
Fourteen Allen films; the full range; Hannah; Purple Rose; Danny Rose
2000
UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador; Darfur advocacy; UN testimony
Filmography

From Rosemary's Fear to Cecilia's Screen

1968Psychological Horror · Roman Polanski · Ira Levin
Rosemary's Baby
Polanski's horror masterwork — Farrow as Rosemary Woodhouse, the young wife whose suspicion that her neighbours have made a Satanic pact involving her pregnancy is the film's entire argument. The performance that established her: the intelligence that makes the terror credible, the vulnerability without passivity, the woman who sees correctly and is not believed.

Rosemary's quality — the rationality that makes the irrational experience more rather than less frightening — is played by Farrow with the specific transparency that the film required: we believe the threat because we believe Rosemary's perception of it, and we believe her perception because her intelligence is never in doubt. The haircut scene — pixie-short in 1968, the year she received it — is the film's visual marker of a woman who has stopped performing what the men around her want to see.

1985Comedy-Drama · Woody Allen
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Allen's Depression-era fantasy — Farrow as Cecilia, the waitress whose Depression misery is relieved only by going to the movies, until a character steps off the screen into her life. The performance most consistently cited by critics as her finest — the longing that is also the film's subject, the woman whose capacity for hope in terrible circumstances is both her vulnerability and the film's argument about cinema's function.
Golden Globe Nom

Cecilia's quality — the woman whose inner life is larger than the outer life she has been given — is played by Farrow with a lightness that prevents the pathos from becoming sentimentality. The ending, in which she watches Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, is Allen's clearest statement about what movies are for, and the statement lands only because Farrow's face in the audience makes us feel exactly what the film argues movies make us feel.

1986Ensemble Drama · Woody Allen · Multiple Characters
Hannah and Her Sisters
Allen's ensemble — Farrow as Hannah, the stable older sister around whom the other characters orbit and whose stability the film slowly reveals to be a burden as much as a gift. She plays the character everyone else takes for granted, and the specific quality of playing a person whose interior is invisible because everyone assumes she doesn't need one.
Golden Globe Nom

Hannah's problem — the woman who is so competently caring that no one notices she might need care herself — is played by Farrow with a restraint that is itself the performance. The moments where the restraint slips — brief, controlled — are the film's most revealing; Farrow uses Hannah's composure as a texture and its occasional failures as the truth beneath it.

"

I think a woman has to find her own voice, and that happens through living — not through what someone tells her she should be.

— Mia Farrow
Honors

Golden Globe — BAFTA Nominations — Darfur's Advocate

Golden Globe — Best Actress, Drama
1969
Rosemary's Baby
Nominated for Rosemary Woodhouse — the Hollywood Foreign Press's recognition that the performance was doing something the horror genre had not previously done: making dread credible through intelligence rather than passivity. The nomination is the industry's first acknowledgment of what she had brought to the film.
Golden Globe Nominated
BAFTA Nomination — Best Actress
1986
The Purple Rose of Cairo
Nominated by the British Academy for Cecilia in The Purple Rose of Cairo — the performance most consistently cited as her finest by the critical establishment, and the one that demonstrated what fourteen years of working with a director who understood her instrument could produce. The BAFTA nomination is the British film establishment's concurrence with the critical consensus.
BAFTA Nominated
UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador
2000 – Present
Darfur · Sudan · Chad
Appointed UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 2000 and has focused particularly on the crisis in Darfur, travelling to the region repeatedly, publishing in Time and The Washington Post, and testifying before the United Nations. The humanitarian commitment represents the same energy the film career deployed, directed at a different and more urgent subject.
UNICEF Ambassador
The Allen Collaboration
1982 – 1992
Fourteen Films · Thirteen Years
Fourteen Woody Allen films across thirteen years — Hannah and Her Sisters, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Broadway Danny Rose, Crimes and Misdemeanors, Alice, Husbands and Wives among them. The most sustained director-actress collaboration in American film history, across the full range of what both were capable of, ending in circumstances that have not resolved cleanly.
14 Films · 13 Years
Identity

The Transparency — The Commitment — The Life Alongside the Work

The Specific Presence
Her specific quality — the vulnerability that is also intelligence, the openness that does not tip into passivity — is what Polanski built Rosemary's Baby around and what Allen built thirteen consecutive films around. The quality is constitutional, not performed, which is why it reads differently to everything else in every room she occupies on screen.
The Allen Years
Fourteen films in thirteen years — a collaboration that produced Hannah and Her Sisters, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Broadway Danny Rose, and Crimes and Misdemeanors among its range. The director understood the instrument he had; the actress understood the director's specific form. The combination produced work neither would have made alone.
The Humanitarian Work
The UNICEF ambassadorship and the Darfur advocacy have occupied as much of her adult life as the film career. She has published in major newspapers, testified before the United Nations, and made multiple trips to the region. The commitment is not supplementary to who she is; it is as central as the films.
The Family
Fourteen biological and adopted children, many with significant disabilities or special needs — a family built with the same deliberateness and commitment she has brought to the rest of her life. The family is a public fact she has never used for publicity and that represents the largest ongoing project of her adult life.
Legacy

Rosemary's Apartment — Cecilia's Cinema — Darfur's Advocate

Mia Farrow's legacy spans two careers and a humanitarian commitment — the actress who made Rosemary's fear credible and Cecilia's longing beautiful, and the advocate who has used the platform those performances generated for work the films could not do. Rosemary's Baby, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters — three films that required a specific quality she has in ways others don't, and that the directors who worked with her consistently built their material around rather than against.

The life alongside the work is equally deliberate. Fourteen children; UNICEF ambassador since 2000; Darfur advocacy pursued with the same discipline as the film career — the public life chosen and maintained as consciously as the roles she accepted and the ones she did not.

Woody Allen Films
1982 to 1992
14
UNICEF Ambassador Since
Darfur, Sudan, Chad
2000
Children
Biological and adopted
14
Years of Darfur Advocacy
And counting
25+