It's taken me a while to get into Mia, but I saw a beautiful picture of her today that stopped me in my tracks and I read an interview she recently did.
So I rushed to look her up on here and I want to say
a huge thank you to everyone who's contributed to the thread with so many glorious pictures of her!
I thought I'd just type in a few bits of info on Mia that gives an insight into the woman - it's quite fascinating.
- She was born Maria de Lourdes Villiers in 1945, to Hollywood director John Farrow and Margaret O'Sullivan (who played Jane in most of the Tarzan movies), and she was one of seven children, right bang in the middle which she said gave her a sense of wanting to make myself special in some way, wanting to draw everyone's attention-parents, nannies, cooks, whoever. Just basically hungry for affection.
- She said she had a wonderful childhood up to a point. When she was 9 she contracted polio, was moved to a hospital isolation unit and her belongings were burned for fear that her other siblings might get the disease. She miracuously survived, but had been isolated for months from those she loved. "Being taken out of my environment and not knowing whether I would return changed me...I saw people suffering and dying around me...up until that point I had never understood mortality." She said that after that period she grew up and became a different person, what she had got was a measure of survivor's guilt, but also a sense of compassion for others.
-When she was 13, her beloved brother, Mike, died in a plane crash at the young age of 19.
- Then tragically when she was 17 she stayed with her mother in New York while O'Sullivan appeared on Broadway, when Mia realised her mother was having an affair with the play's director, George Abbott. Mia ignored a string of phone calls from her father, who suspected what was going on, and devastingly, she found out the next day that her father had suddenly died of a heart attack,
still clutching the phone. She said that when she found out the news she wrote in her memoirs that "the winds of nothingness blew across my soul."
- When she divorced her first husband, Frank Sinatra, the only things she took from the marriage was a music box and an encyclopedia and "his friendship and respect" she says. How sweet is that?
- I guess everyone knows about the whole Woody Allen and step-daughter episode!
- And when Mia married Sinatra at the age of 21, Sinatra's previous wife Ava Gardner had spikily commented that she always knew that "Frank would end up in bed with a boy." But even so, Ava and Mia became close friends (especially when the two of them were living in England, whilst Mia was married to Andre Previn). Ava would often say to Mia "You are the child Frank and I never had!" and because she'd once had an affair with Mia's father and they were both married to Frank it kinda made mad sense, she commented.
She literally is a Woody Allen film heroine, only he didn't have to pen a script. The whole history was already there!
lol: 
Hmm, I can't remember, it was over a month ago.
