She was nine years old when she got polio.
This was 1954 — one year before Jonas Salk's vaccine was declared safe and effective. She was kept in isolation as she recovered, surrounded by other children in iron lungs, watching some of them die.
She survived.
Decades later, she would spend years of her life traveling the world trying to eradicate the disease that had nearly taken her as a child.
That is the kind of person Mia Farrow is — and it is almost never the first thing anyone mentions about her.
She was born María de Lourdes Villiers Farrow on February 9, 1945, in Los Angeles, California.
Her father, John Farrow, was an Australian-born film director. Her mother, Maureen O'Sullivan, was the Irish actress best known for playing Jane in the Tarzan films — one of the most recognized faces in Hollywood.
There were seven children in the family. Mia was the third.
Her childhood was marked by loss as well as privilege.
At nine, she fought through polio in isolation.
At thirteen, her nineteen-year-old brother Michael was killed in a plane crash.
Much later in life, her brother Patrick — who had become a sculptor — died by suicide in 2009.
She carried all of it, and kept moving.
She was sixteen when she began pursuing acting seriously.
Her first credited film role came in 1964. That same year, she was cast in the primetime television soap opera Peyton Place as Allison MacKenzie — a role that made her one of the most recognized young actresses in America almost overnight.
She left the show in 1966 after marrying Frank Sinatra.
She was twenty-one. He was fifty.
It was one of the most talked-about marriages in Hollywood history, and it lasted two years.
After the divorce, she went to India.
In early 1968, she traveled to the ashram of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Rishikesh to study transcendental meditation.
She was not the only notable figure there.
The Beatles were in residence — John, Paul, George, and Ringo — along with Donovan and Mike Love of the Beach Boys.
Her younger sister Prudence was also there.
Prudence became so deeply immersed in meditation that she would not come out of her room for days at a time. John Lennon wrote a song for her — calling her back to the world, back to the sunshine.
It became one of the most beloved songs the Beatles ever recorded.
Dear Prudence.
Later that year, Rosemary's Baby was released.
Roman Polanski's horror masterpiece — in which Mia Farrow played a young woman who comes to believe her unborn child has been given to the Devil — is considered one of the defining American films of the 1960s.
Her performance earned her a Golden Globe Award for New Star of the Year.
She was not yet twenty-four.
In the 1970s, she became the first American actress invited to join the Royal Shakespeare Company — spending years in London doing classical theater, building a craft that her Hollywood work had only partially showcased.
She married composer and conductor André Previn in 1970. They had three biological children and adopted three more together — including children from Vietnam and Korea. The marriage ended in 1979.
Throughout the 1980s, she collaborated extensively with director Woody Allen on thirteen films — Zelig, Broadway Danny Rose, The Purple Rose of Cairo, Hannah and Her Sisters, Radio Days, Crimes and Misdemeanors, and others.
The films brought her the most sustained critical recognition of her career.
The relationship ended in 1992 under circumstances that became one of the most publicly complicated personal stories in entertainment history.
She has raised fourteen children — biological and adopted — many of them from countries in crisis.
She has never stopped.
In April 2004, she read an op-ed in the New York Times about the tenth anniversary of the Rwandan genocide — and what was then unfolding in the Darfur region of Sudan.
She described the piece as making her knees buckle.
She booked a trip.
What followed was years of direct, sustained activism that went far beyond celebrity endorsement.
She made repeated trips to refugee camps in eastern Chad — sitting at the Darfur border, documenting what she saw, photographing survivors, and reporting what she found to anyone who would listen.
She became a board member of the Darfur Women Action Group.
She became a leading voice in the international campaign to hold China accountable for its oil trade with Sudan — a relationship she and others argued was directly funding the atrocities.
In March 2007, she co-authored an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal with her son Ronan targeting Steven Spielberg, who had been named an artistic adviser to the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
The argument was precise: China was the largest buyer of Sudanese oil. Sudan's government was conducting a genocide. Spielberg's involvement was lending legitimacy to a regime that was enabling it.
Spielberg resigned from his role as artistic adviser to the Beijing Olympics.
China — responding to what had become an international campaign — appointed a special envoy to Darfur and took steps that had been previously refused.
Mia Farrow had, through strategic public pressure, moved one of the most powerful governments on earth.
She co-founded the Olympic Dream for Darfur campaign. She carried an alternative Olympic torch through genocide memorial sites — Rwanda, Sarajevo, the Darfur-Chad border — in a relay that reached nine countries.
In 2008, Time magazine named her one of the hundred most influential people in the world.
She was also, that same year, standing in a refugee camp at the edge of the Sahara, at the Darfur border, talking to the people the world was not watching.
She had become a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador in 2000.
Part of what drove that work was deeply personal.
She had survived polio as a child. One of her adopted sons, Thaddeus, had also contracted polio.
She understood the disease from the inside — what it took from children, what it left behind.
She dedicated years to UNICEF's global polio eradication campaign, traveling to conflict zones where the disease still persisted, raising funds, and drawing attention to areas where vaccination programs had been disrupted by war.
She has fourteen children.
She has appeared in more than fifty films.
She survived polio at nine and spent decades fighting to make sure other children didn't have to.
She sat at the edge of the Sahara and made China blink.
The girl from Beverly Hills, daughter of two Hollywood legends, who grew up in the shadow of the biggest industry in the world and spent the last twenty years of her career doing the work that had nothing to do with cameras or fame or recognition.
The actress who turned out to be, above everything else, a witness.
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