Mia Farrow

American actress and noted family, the third of seven kids of writer-director John Farrow and actress Maureen OSullivan. 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 parents marriage suffered under that blow. While OSullivan 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, "Rosemarys 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 Previns 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 others 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. Thei Read less