MIA FARROW: Nanny knows best
Too easy this morning to write a withering the-woman-is-bonkers portrait of Mia Farrow. Instead, we’ll go straight into a quotation from her website, MiaFarrow.org: “In an extraordinary act of conscience,” it reads, “Steven Spielberg today announced the end of his involvement as an artistic director of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.”
That reference to the “Beijing Olympics” is, for Farrow, extremely diplomatic. She has preferred to call it the “Genocide Olympics” ever since she read a piece on Darfur in The New York Times and asked herself aloud, in front of several journalists: “Are we to conclude that the words ‘never again’ apply only to white people?”
China buys two thirds of Sudan’s oil exports, sells weapons to the Sudanese Government and has defended Khartoum in the UN Security Council. Farrow asks herself a second question in front of the star-struck newshounds: “How can Beijing host the Olympic Games at home and underwrite genocide?” To which the answer, from China’s perspective, must be: How is it that a woman who most recently played a satanic nanny in the remake of The Omen (2006) is telling us how to run our foreign policy? To which, if we can prolong this imaginary conference call a little farther, 63-year-old Farrow would surely retort that, yes, it’s true that she played the satanic childminder but contextually it made sense, given her stand-out role as the naive wife inseminated with the Devil’s spawn in Rosemary’s Baby. And that her nice line in indignant rhetoric stems only partly from her skills as an actress, being also influenced by her difficult childhood (polio at 9, the death of her brother at 13, her parents’ subsequent alcohol-fuelled decline, her father’s death when she was 17); her difficult adulthood (first kiss with Sinatra at 19; lonely marriage to Andr? Previn; the discovery of those nude Polaroids of her adoptive daughter – Big Love No 3, Woody Allen, was having an affair with Soon-Yi Previn), and her longstanding commitment to world peace.
Farrow was instrumental in persuading Spielberg to bail out of Beijing. And although the woman is bonkers in that flowery way that encourages her to wear a Star of David, a crucifix and a Koranic leather pendant simultaneously around her neck, she has great influence in Hollywood and does some laudable things, too, such as banning her children from watching TV.
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What drives her? Conviction? A desire to escape the chaos of her eccentric Hollywood childhood? Or a life-changing mishearing? After her split with Sinatra, Farrow fled to India to join the Beatles in an ashram. “As the Maharishi said my mantra, I sneezed. I said ‘Excuse me? I don’t think I heard you exactly right’. But he wouldn’t repeat it. So I still don’t know if I’m doing it right.”