Mia Farrow survived childhood polio, then became Hollywood's most haunted young mother
At nine, Mia Farrow spent three weeks in a polio isolation ward and later said it ended her childhood. By 23 she was the terrified expectant mother in Rosemary's Baby, a role that made her an international star, and six decades on she was still earning Tony nominations on Broadway.
Born in Los Angeles on February 9, 1945, she was the eldest daughter of Australian director John Farrow and Irish actress Maureen O'Sullivan, one of seven children; George Cukor and gossip columnist Louella Parsons were her godparents. She grew up in a strict Catholic home in Beverly Hills, staging mock-gory shows with toy daggers for passing celebrity tour buses, and appeared in a short documentary at two.
Her teens were hard. The family moved to Europe while her father filmed John Paul Jones, and she boarded at a convent school in Surrey. Her eldest brother Michael died in a plane crash in 1958, her father drank heavily, and he died of a heart attack when she was 17, leaving the family short of money. She worked as a model and took a replacement part in a New York staging of The Importance of Being Earnest to support her siblings.
A screen test for Liesl in The Sound of Music went nowhere, but in 1964 she became a star as the fragile Allison MacKenzie on the prime-time soap Peyton Place. Frank Sinatra pressed her to leave the show in 1966, and they wed that July, when she was 21 and he was 50. Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby in 1968 brought BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations, followed by The Great Gatsby and Death on the Nile in the 1970s.
From 1980 to 1992 she was partnered with Woody Allen and appeared in thirteen of his films, earning Golden Globe nods for The Purple Rose of Cairo and others. In 1992 she accused him of abusing their adopted daughter Dylan; Allen was never charged and denies it. Later she worked as a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador, was named among Time's most influential people in 2008, and returned to Broadway in The Roommate in 2025, gaining a Tony nomination.
Source: Mia Farrow
