“I HAVE ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER,” says Mia Farrow jokingly. “But I also have obsessive compulsive disorder, so they balance each other out very well.” Mia is candid and surprisingly funny. Her smile invites you into a childlike world of compassion and humility. When she stares at you intensely as she drives home the fact that her focus these days is on issues like the crisis in Darfur, she is tough and direct, a force of experience to be reckoned with. Perhaps it is this duality, the tough vulnerability, that is at the heart of her impressive onscreen presence, and her extraordinary life story. Upstairs in Mia’s home, we pass along corridors of family photographs, past her children’s rooms to her private off i ce. In the small room, a computer sits on a workbench. A map of the world leans, rolled up, against the door. Its place on the wall is now f i lled with a map of Darfur – Mia’s worldview has literally narrowed to the current humanitarian crisis. Smaller print-outs of the shifting but ever-growing “no-go zones” are tacked to the remaining wall space. This is the command centre from where she conducts her campaign operations in response to the deepening crisis in the region. She delivers lectures at universities, and in November last year, she spoke alongside Bill Clinton at the inaugural Montreal Millennium Promise Conference, an international forum on child poverty. Her eye witness accounts have featured in newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune , and she has also given television and radio interviews – “Anything I can to help the people of Darfur,” she says. “I don’t understand all those people of my generation, who were part of the anti-Vietnam peace movement in the 60s and were so full of compassion, where are they now? Have they just given up? Where does that apathy come from?” As a UNICEF goodwill ambassador, Mia has been to the Darfur region three times to report on the mounting crisis. The second time she took her son Ronan, a UNICEF youth spokesperson, with her. The security situation in Sudan remains precarious, with hundreds of thousands of people living beyond the reach of UN aid agencies, as killing and raping continue unabated. The UN Security Council’s resolution has been calling for the deployment of a nearly 20,000-strong UN peacekeeping force, but the Sudanese government has so far refused access to the region. This is genocide and it is happening now. “We are def i ned, in this moment, by our reaction to this genocide, which has now reached Chad and the Central African Republic,” Farrow said in a recent BBC interview. If she is focused and determined now, Mia’s life has been turbulent, with the highs and lows compressed into short spaces of time. WHAT FALLS AWAY , her exceptionally well written autobiography, published almost ten years ago, reads like a rollercoaster of despair followed by hope; emotional trauma transformed into spiritual strength.

Born in 1945, Mia was the daughter of Irish-born Maureen O’Sullivan, an MGM ingéénue who played Jane in the f i rst six Tarzan f i lms, and John Farrow, the Australian-born director and screenwriter (awarded an Oscar for his adapted screenplay for Around The

World in Eighty Days ). She was one of seven children who were brought up in an idyllic 50s Hollywood setting. They were part of Beverly Hills society, and Mia, as a child of Hollywood, was quick to understand its luxuries and limitations. Her biography begins at the age of nine in a scene as dramatic as anything from her recent f i lm, THE OMEN . As a young girl, Mia is lying face up on the f l oor of the school playground. The children’s faces leer over her, examining her as she lays still, conscious but paralysed and in fear. She is admitted to hospital with polio, in what was to be a life-def i ning moment – UNICEF would later invite her to be a part of its global polio vaccine initiative. When she was 13, Mia’s older brother Michael died while learning to f l y a plane, and at 17, her father suffered a fatal heart attack. At the time, Mia and her mother were living in New York, while John Farrow was in LA. She describes how her parents relationship had broken down by that point. The night her father died, he telephoned the New York apartment. Her mother was out and not wanting to betray her mother’s conf i dence Mia (regretfully) didn’t take the call. On hearing the news, she writes, “Winds of nothingness blew across my mind.” Soon after, Mia began acting. Her f i rst gig was for the theatre, her ability to effortlessly slip into an English accent, learnt during her boarding school days in England, got her the part in a Broadway production of THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING ERNEST . Following this, she auditioned for PEYTON PLACE . At just 17, Mia was catapulted from obscurity to appear on prime time TV three times a week starring alongside fellow newcomer Ryan O’Neal. Even then, her rebellious streak came out, and, famously, she cut her hair. She became the androgynous sex symbol of the 60s, the f i rst waif, the f i rst girl-boy, a less than size zero icon for a generation about to erupt into a peace and love, anything-goes sexual revolution. “I was lazy and had never given much thought to it. I picked up a pair of scissors and cut my hair to less than an inch in length, laid it in a plastic bag, and turned to the mirror. It looked fi ne to me. But the hairdresser was aghast, the producers upset, and people with wigs were summoned, and there were stern lectures about responsibility. I apologised a lot, but privately, I couldn’t see a problem. There must have been nothing going on in the world that week, because my haircut generated an absurd amount of press coverage. There was wild speculation as to why I had done it; some said it was to spite Frank, and back in New York, Salvador Dali, never one to minimise, labelled it ‘mythical suicide’. But there was no drama, no fi ght with Frank, he loved my hair the minute he saw it, so I kept it short for years.”

Mia met Frank Sinatra on the lot of Fox studios, and they married in Las Vegas in 1966. Mia was 21, and their relationship, partly due

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to the age gap (Sinatra was 30 years her senior), was the focus of intense media scrutiny and public obsession. The marriage lasted two years, and the infamous divorce proceedings were served during the shooting of her careerdef i ning f i lm, ROSEMARY’S BABY . Frank and Mia were scheduled to star together in THE DETECTIVE , but the f i lming of ROSEMARY’S BABY was running over schedule, so

Mia became torn between her existing work commitments and Sinatra’s increasingly hostile ultimatums. In the end, it was producer Bob Evans who pulled her aside to view an hour’s rough-cut of her performance, convincing her that she was making the f i lm of a lifetime. When Mickey Rudin, the celebrity lawyer, turned up on set with the divorce papers, it was, she has said, the f i rst time that Sinatra had mentioned divorce. “If Frank wanted a divorce then the marriage was over. I told Mickey Rudin that I would do whatever they wanted. I would have no need for legal consul myself.” Mia had achieved fame and success without having a game plan, without pushing or having been groomed for the limelight. She appeared as an innocent, a lost, almost naive f i gure. “My life had fallen away and I could not envision a future. Work and religion suggested themselves, but extended thought about either left me in a tangle of confusion and suspicion. It seemed to me that my brief acting career had summoned all the selfi shness, arrogance, and short sightedness inherent in me, and these unworthy elements had conspired to destroy what I needed and wanted most. I wasn’t a paediatrician in South East Asia, or a Carmelite nun in England: I was a lightweight – a Hollywood starlet on the verge of divorce.”

Her sister Prudence took Mia to India where they stayed in an ashram with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and the Beatles, their girlfriends and Donovan. “‘Whenever I meditate,’ John (Lennon) said in his irresistible Liverpool accent, ‘There is a big brass band in me head,’” Mia wrote later. She saw through the Maharishi’s facade when he took her for a private meditation session in his cellar, and after some chanting, his hands began to wander. She ran from the cellar, packed her bags, and left the ashram for the real India. A year later, she found herself in a relationship with the composer Andréé Previn, when they both worked on JOHN AND MARY (in which she starred alongside Dustin Hoffman). They married, and Mia gave birth to twins, Matthew and Sascha, followed by a son, Fletcher. Together, they went on to adopt three children, SoonYi, Lark Song and Summer Song. She describes their second year of marriage

in her autobiography: “If you counted all the days he wasn’t somewhere else, we spent a total of 15 days together. It was not an atypical year.” JOHN AND MARY was followed by notable performances in THE GREAT GATSBY and DEATH ON THE NILE . Then

came a chance meeting with Woody Allen. Her friend Michael Caine took Mia and Mick Jagger for dinner at Elaine’s, and as they walked in, they passed Woody’s table. It is clear from her autobiography, that they had been admirers of each other. In the 12 years they were together, they made as many f i lms, they had a son in 1987, Satchel, now known as Ronan, and adopted two children, Moses and Dylan. Such is her versatility as an actress and her emotional sensitivity, that she can shift from brash Maf i a widow in BROADWAY DANNY ROSE to destitute housewife in PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO to compassionate psychoanalyst in ZELIG . Allen is a challenging director and with each new role he gave her, Mia would transform it and more often than not, outdo him. Allen and Mia’s separation is well documented – Mia and her children’s lives were subject to constant media attention, and they were besieged daily by TV crews and paparazzi. Allen has since married Soon-Yi, Farrow and Previn’s adopted daughter. The investigation into claims that Allen abused their adopted daughter Dylan lasted a year, and although evidence was found to support the case against him, it was dropped to protect the child from the media and a trial. After her split from Allen, Mia adopted Tam (who passed away in 2000 from a cardiac arrest aged 19), Isaiah, Quincy, Thadues and Gabriel, who all joined her ever-expanding family.

Last year, she returned to the big screen with the remake of THE OMEN , in which she took the role of Damien Omen’s hellbent nanny Mrs Baylock, the part earned her critical acclaim. This year, she will appear in FAST TRACK , a romantic comedy and Michel Gondry’s much anticipated BE KIND REWIND . She had just f i nished f i lming with Michel

when this interview took place, two weeks prior to her return to Africa (her third visit) to the Sudanese/Chad border to report on the ongoing humanitarian crisis. Downstairs, we settle in the library to begin the interview. We walk past f i lm posters from ROSEMARY’S BABY and ALICE , nestled between framed photos of family and friends. Frog Hollow in Connecticut has been Mia’s retreat from New York for 25 years, and her permanent home for her and her family since 1994. Perhaps it is her commitment to her extensive family and her campaigning work that makes Mia so grounded and focused on the here and now. She seems to dislike dwelling on the past. The focus of the interview is her work for UNICEF and the campaign to save lives in Darfur. Her personal life and her f i lm career, like the photographs on her walls, are the context; an indication of the energy and extraordinary vision of Mia Farrow – icon, mother, activist and artist. a

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