Mia Speaks Out On Darfur

Monday, March 17th: Mia Farrow, the star of Rosemary’s Baby, The Great Gatsby, and the Woody Allen films, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and Broadway Danny Rose, was in Denver to talk about her glamorous Hollywood childhood and career. Growing up in Beverly Hills to Hollywood parents, she had childhood friends like Liza Minnelli, her dog was the grandson of Lassie, she hung out with the Beatles in India while they wrote a song, “Dear Prudence”, about her sister, she eventually married Frank Sinatra, and then was with Woody Allen for many years until their ugly divorce in 1992. While she was happy to talk about her glamorous life, it was the issue of Darfur and her advocacy efforts to end the killings and violence there that really impassioned her. In the western region of Sudan, Darfur is where the Sudanese government, along with an allied Arab militia, the Janjaweed, have been accused of mass killings, lootings, and the systematic rape of the civilian population. Beginning in 2003, the conflict has caused an estimated 200,000 to 400,000 deaths.

In Her Own Words

“My childhood was idyllic. I grew up in Beverly Hills, California. My mom was a magical movie star called Maureen O’Sullivan. Remember the old Tarzan movies? You know Cheeta the chimp? She referred always to Cheeta the chimp as ‘That Bastard’. So I thought Cheeta’s second name was ‘That Bastard’. She did it at every opportunity. My dad was an Academy Award winning writer and director [John Farrow]. We had a house in Beverly Hills, California. You know how it is in California: butterflies in February, fruit trees all year round. It was swell. And then when I was nine, something happened that really changed things forever. My childhood ended. I got polio.”

“The day after my ninth birthday, our pediatrician came and he did a spinal tap. Ever have one of those? My mom kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, this is what we do when we have babies’, ‘I’m nine years old, I don’t want a baby!’. So, I’m getting the spinal tap and I’m hearing the drone of the rosary in the next room, a Catholic family, and the drone of the rosary was eventually drowned out by the sound of the ambulance. People came in and started taking me away, picking me up. All of my worldly goods, my dolls’ eyes that my brothers had taken out, that feather I could never part with, special stuff in seven different cars for all my brothers and sisters. As they were carrying me out the door, I heard the doctor say to my mother, ‘Better burn all that’.”

“They took me away from my parents and we were in these wards where my parents could come twice a week and they could wave at me from behind glass. And people would disappear in the nights. The people that disappeared would be the ones who were dying or who had died. A little girl that finally stopped trying to breathe in my ward. Like that. And then when I got home, it was so strange because that house in Beverly Hills, they had torn up the lawn, they had drained the swimming pool, they had taken all the wallpaper off the walls, they had recovered the couches, the family had moved to another house in Malibu, and all of this because of the dog, bearer of flies and germs, who was actually the grandson of the real Lassie. Honest to God. Everything was changed.”

“Polio gave me certain survival skills that have served me well throughout my life.”

“I discovered that whatever your losses or predicament, you can still pretty much choose your attitude.”

“I discovered that you can’t really own anything. That true ownership comes in the moment of giving.”

“When I was 13, my brother Mike–a US Marine–died in a plane crash. What the Irish do, is they drink—not me, of course, others…. [laughter]. In times of sorrow, bad times, ‘Sorry for your loss, will you have a drink?’, so the family drank, my mother and father did, and my father never worked again, he died of a stroke when I was 17, just despair really. So my Mom took the reins and went to New York and got herself a Broadway play and I followed in tow and with the rest of the kids….”

“The big secret is one thing you don’t need a lot of education for is acting. You can do it with no education whatsoever. Kids and dogs do really well.” [laughter]

“I went out looking for jobs and to my astonishment I landed a job almost immediately and was in a Broadway play. And then things really started moving fast and I could not believe it. And the next thing I knew, I was in a TV series, Peyton Place. I first thing I did when I got out there to California, I got an apartment. But even before I got the apartment… with $300 dollars, I bought a horse and then I filled the refrigerator with Sara Lee chocolate cake. I just thought that nobody could tell me what to eat anymore, I could eat whatever I want, this is great! I’ll have chocolate cake in the morning, I’ll have M&Ms all day long and then I have my horse.” [laughter]

“So, I’m rollerskating along and what do I see but a train. Love trains! So I stopped and took off my skates—it was one of those that you turn and get to keep your shoes on underneath—and I walked in and looked at this train and people were running around in uniform and shouting and this is really exciting, they were making a real movie and I was watching. And someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Hey kid, do you want to meet Frank Sinatra?’ You know, I’m into the Beatles…. [laughter] I wasn’t quite exactly sure who Frank was, he was probably one of my parent’s friends… There was Bing Crosby, there was Frank Sinatra, and I couldn’t have told you what songs he sang or anything. So, I went over there and they introduced me and I said, ‘How do you do?’ and he had those blue eyes—he did!—and the way he looked at me, honest to God, I’ve never had anyone look at me like that in my whole life. I swallowed my gum… and then I dropped my bag—and it was one of those straw bags—which I didn’t have both handles on I guess, it slipped out of my hand. Everything went rolling out, right between his feet. Everything. I had a cat, the cat ate baby food, little jars of baby food were rolling in every direction. My retainer! It rolled out right onto his shoe. And then he walks me to the door and I didn’t want to blush—what do I care, he was one of my parent’s friends, you know—and then he said, ‘Do you want to see a movie tomorrow night?’ His movie. The movie he made, actually. So I said ‘Sure’, I don’t know how I said ’sure’ like that, I would worry and couldn’t sleep for worrying. And then I went to see the movie. If nothing, I am punctual, right on time, I said, ‘Hello’ and sat down and watched the movie. I don’t remember much about the movie, it was our guys and the Japanese, and there was a fracas of some kind. [laughter] What I really remember is that he reached over and held my hand. You know how your hand gets really sweaty when you’re nervous? I just never had that before, I didn’t have a boyfriend before and I didn’t know how that would be interpreted if I took out my hand and wiped it? I needed to wipe my hand. But then I thought, if I did that, could I then put my hand back in his hand? After it was dried off? I was just frozen. Frozen in fear. And then at the end of the movie—I did wipe my hands—he asked me if I wanted to go to Palm Springs with him. That night. What?!?!”

“I packed four jars of baby food, which is the boldest thing I’ve done to date. In case, I was going to stay overnight. And, you know, to make a long story short, we got married. And we had four and a half, not altogether busy, but totally amazing high point years.”


“I loved him [Frank Sinatra] until the day he died and beyond. And his daughters—Nancy and Tina—are like my sisters. When we were in the funeral parlor—I hate that word, ‘funeral parlor’—we went to see him there for the funeral, we put a little bottle of Jack Daniels in there. Because he never liked to travel without his Jack Daniels.”

“At that same moment, a hit movie, Rosemary’s Baby, was handed to me and a full blown movie career opened up for me. Suddenly, I had what a lot of people search for their whole life. I had what seemed to me to be a fortune. I had a family. I had a critical success in my own profession. If you want it, I had fame. Fame and fortune. All those things. I was very fortunate and grateful to have those things. But also, and maybe most especially, to discover that the old cliche is true, that in and of themselves, they do not make you happy. I was never more miserable. I didn’t know what to do, and my sister Prudence, who was lost in some nightmare of her own, said, ‘Why don’t we go to India? And we’ll go to the Maharishi.’ And I went, ‘OK….’ Whatever that is. Where ever that is. Whatever that’s for. I just had no where else to go. So we go all the way to the Himalayas. We are going to learn to meditate, and I’m going to become spiritually evolved, I’m going to achieve pure bliss no less and spiritual enlightenment and I’m meditating on—oh, you get a mantra, do you know? Has anyone here ever got a mantra? You bring flowers and fruit after a certain training period, it’s a very special day, and you sit with your guru, this is the Maharishi, and he leaned forward to give me that mantra, except I have hay fever, and he had all these flowers around his neck, and in that moment that he gave me the mantra, I sneezed, and he had a beard as well, so I didn’t quite catch it, and I said, ‘Excuse me? Could you just repeat that?’ And you know he never would. I’m sure that’s why I never really levitated or achieved pure bliss.”

“So I’m trying to meditate, trying to meditate, think of the right word…. Who should come to the ashram after a month of my best endeavors? All four Beatles. All the way to the Himalayas. And once again there are photographers in the trees. And my sister, Prudence, the evolved one, saying, ‘It’s your karma, Mia, you can’t run away from it.’ And I was screaming. And it turned out they were great company. I was really ready for a little something else. A blast. We didn’t have to meditate all day anymore. Prudy was meditating all day and they wrote the song, “Dear Prudence”, for my sister Prudence. She is so humble, it barely even registered with her.”

“I have 14 wonderful children, ranging in age from 14 to 37. We are a rainbow tribe, representing so many virtues and disabilities. They are my teachers and joy and more.”

“In times of loss, I did my best to define myself to my kids, to my friends, to God—whatever that is—and to myself. This was the goal I set. Every plunge into darkness left me struggling for light. And every personal humiliation endured just served to strip away what was non-essential in me. And made me understand really it is by that which cannot be taken away that we can measure ourselves.” [applause]

“It was in 2004 that I first heard of Darfur. I had reshaped another life with my children. I was wondering how it had happened that in 100 days in a country called Rwanda a million or so people were slaughtered. I felt a sense of personal despair that we had done nothing, I had done nothing, and I Googled ‘What were we doing during those 100 days that such atrocities could happen’. Well, we were watching the OJ Simpson murder trial and our press didn’t do its job. And I didn’t know about Rwanda until afterward until it was too late. So when I heard about Darfur in 2004 it was one of those knee-buckling moments that beneath the mainstream media radar something terrible was happening in a place I had never heard of in Sudan. I went there in 2004 and I don’t take this off, it was given to me by a woman named Holima. She had been wearing it when her village was attacked and she had been holding her infant son who was torn from her arms and bayoneted in front of her eyes. Three of her five children were killed in that way and her husband too. And she clasped my hands and said, “Tell people what is happening here. Tell them we need help. We will all be slaughtered.”