Mia Farrow

Lore & Background

By the time Mia Farrow crossed paths with Frank Sinatra, she was no unknown. She had already appeared in a string of well-received British and American pictures in the early 1960s, and the Hollywood press had begun to notice her. Sinatra, by contrast, was in the full blaze of his prime—still commanding the stage, still the most recognizable voice in popular music, still the man every tabloid needed a story about. Their courtship was brief and ferociously public, and the 1966 wedding at the Beverly Hills Hotel was one of the social events of the year. The marriage itself lasted roughly two years. Sinatra.' Farrow, who had come to Hollywood as a working actress with her own ambitions, found herself in a role that was as much a public performance as a private one. The divorce in 1968 was handled with a mutual public grace that the press found almost refreshing after the usual Sinatra marital drama, and the two remained in a cordial, if distant, relationship for years afterward. Ryan would grow up in the shadow of his father's fame and eventually carve out his own considerable career as a film actor, earning an Oscar for 'Paper Moon' in 1974. In fan discussions, Ryan is often the thread that keeps the Farrow-Sinatra connection alive decades later, a living reminder of what that brief, brilliant intersection produced.

Reader's Guide

Mia Farrow entered Frank Sinatra's world in 1966 and left it in 1968, but in those two years she was, for all practical purposes, the center of his public life. She was already a working actress—she had been on British and American screens since the early 1960s—so she was not a debutante being handed a role. She came in with her own craft, her own agent, her own opinions, and that, by Sinatra's standards, was both a thrill and a friction point. The working dynamic in the Sinatra household was, by any account, a collision of two very different relationships to fame. Frank lived for the audience; the applause was oxygen. Mia, for all her glamour, was fundamentally a performer who needed the quiet of a set, the discipline of a script, the solitude of a character. The parties at the Beverly Hills Hotel, the endless press calls, the expectation that she be 'Mrs. Sinatra' before she was Mia—these were the textures of daily life. She reportedly found the constant surveillance exhausting, and Frank, for all his charm, could be oblivious to the fact that the woman beside him needed a few hours without a camera in the room. What they shared, and what fans still talk about, was the son. Ryan O'Neal, born in 1966, became the one thread that kept the two worlds connected long after the divorce. Frank was a present, if sometimes unpredictable, father; Mia was the steady anchor.

Did You Know?

• Mia Farrow was already an established film actress with several credits to her name before she married Frank Sinatra in 1966—she was not a newcomer stepping into his orbit.
• Their son, Ryan O'Neal, went on to win the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for 'Paper Moon' (1974), making him the only child of Sinatra to earn a major acting Oscar.