The folly of Mamma Mia: Wouldn't Mia Farrow be better off helping her own dysfunctional family?
By Sue Reid
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1180662/The-folly-Mamma-Mia-Wouldnt-Mia-Farrow-better-helping-dysfunctional-family.html#
For almost a fortnight - until her doctor stepped in 24 hours ago warning she was about to die - the gaunt face of Mia Farrow has stared straight at the camera as she has grown increasingly thin.
The actress has been on hunger strike as part of a campaign to highlight the starving and sick orphans in Africa's war-torn Darfur region of Sudan.
Every day she made a new film appearance on YouTube, charting her physical decline as she lived on a diet of water and no food. 'I'm just an actress,' she said one morning last week (having, apparently, crawled out of her bed in a darkened room to appear in the video clip).
Natural and adopted: Mia Farrow in 1978 with some of her children Mathew, 7, Sasha, 7, Soon-yi, 7, Lark Song, 5, Fletcher, 5, and Summer, 3
'I'm not presuming anybody will care whether I starve to death. But I can't be among those who just watch. I honestly couldn't think of anything else to do.'
Mia Farrow believed her extraordinary stunt might chivvy Barack Obama into action.
She says he could, with a wave of the Presidential wand, insist that Western aid workers - now expelled from Darfur - return to the country to help children there.
It is an idea that has just received a robust rebuff from the Sudanese government. 'Ms Farrow is like George Clooney, who also got involved in the Darfur question. He is good-looking but ignorant. She is ignorant, too,' said Khalid al-Mubarak, a spokesman at the country's embassy in London.
What Mia Farrow thinks of Mr al-Mubarak's opinion is anyone's guess. She has always loved children, or so she says. Only five months ago, in another publicity blitz, she was photographed clasping the hands of orphans in the Congo.
Crisis: Mia Farrow talks about having to quit her hunger strike over her doctor's fears that she would die
On a fundraising trip for the United Nations' charity Unicef the elfin-faced star placed one boy on her knee and cuddled another. The haunting pictures subsequently appeared in glossy magazines all over the globe.
Farrow's high-profile protests for African children pluck at the heart strings. Her doctor, who has now told her to abandon her latest stunt (she was, apparently, in danger of having a life-threatening seizure) begged her never to start it, although she managed to put 9lb on to her tiny frame in preparation.
Her friends tried to convince the 64-year-old that if they could find another celebrity to take her place, she could withdraw from the protest gracefully.
Unsurprisingly, none of the Hollywood glitterati stepped forward to pick up the baton, although at what now appears to be the 11th hour, the tycoon Sir Richard Branson - who also enjoys the glare of publicity - has agreed to do so.
Many of Farrow's friends must have wondered why the actress - about to be embroiled in a New York courtroom row which promises to revive salacious details of her family life with former lover Woody Allen, and also recovering from the death of her own troubled daughter - does not devote more of her time to her own children and grandchildren.
It was while Mia Farrow was thousands of miles away in the Congo in December that her eldest daughter, Lark, became desperately ill. She was living in a shabby apartment in the New York suburb, the Bronx.
The actress in 1998 with her adopted daughter Lark, who contracted Aids in her 20s
Only 35, Lark died in hospital on Christmas Day of pneumonia, leaving Mia's granddaughters, aged 12 and 13, without a mother and only a wayward father they hardly see.
It was the final chapter of Lark's fractured existence. Adopted by Mia in the early Seventies from a Saigon orphanage - again amid worldwide publicity - she was three months old and had been abandoned by her birth mother at the height of the Vietnam War.
Farrow's move was praised as an act of genuine philanthropy at a time when adoptions of poor foreign children by celebrities - now accepted as all rather familiar thanks to Madonna and Angelina Jolie - were practically unheard of.
The bewildered dark-eyed girl was brought from Vietnam to Britain, where the actress then lived in a mansion near Dorking, Surrey, with her second husband, the conductor Andre Previn. Greeted by the couple at the airport, the youngster was dressed in a check-romper suit - her only outfit - with a parcel, containing a tin teaspoon, tied to her wrist.
By all accounts she had a happy early childhood with her stepsister Daisy, whom Farrow adopted a year later in 1974. It was only afterwards, when the actress returned to America, that Lark (who was so named because it had 'just the right Eastern ring about it,' according to Mia) began to spiral out of control.
As a teenager, she was convicted of shoplifting hundreds of dollars worth of lingerie from a shopping mall with Daisy and later struggled to rid herself of a drug habit.
Then, in her 20s, she mysteriously contracted HIV/Aids, which she - and her then husband, an unemployed builder named Chris McKinzie - always claimed was caught from a dirty needle at a tattoo parlour.
As a result, the couple's two children - Sara and Christine - were born with the virus, much to Farrow's horror. Despite Mia's success and wealth, they have grown up in near poverty.
When Lark died, the stairway to her grim apartment had paint peeling off the walls and there was the cloying odour of cooking. The only cheering note was a plastic Father Christmas pinned to the front door by the girls.
Lark struggled to pay the fees for her daughters' private church school, and her illness meant that, although she drove her daughters there, she was often too unwell to leave the car and walk them along the short path to class.
Mia cradles a baby Lark, soon after adoption. She's with her then husband Andre Previn in 1973 at Heathrow Airport
Father Timothy Tighe, the priest who presided over her funeral service, recalls: 'Lark had very little money, but she really tried to do a good job in bringing the girls up. Her ex-husband, Chris McKinzie, is disliked by everyone in the family.
'When he arrived at the funeral he was asked to go. The family hates him because they blame him for the downfall of Lark. It was a blessing that he did as he was told and went away after paying his respects.'
Sitting beside their sobbing grandmother at the service in New York, the bereaved girls listened as the priest paid a tribute to Lark. He said: 'She had dark moments, but she put one foot in front of the other and kept going for her own daughters.'
They were kind words. Yet the truth is that Lark's death is the latest in a long line of misfortunes to befall Mia Farrow and her increasingly dysfunctional family.
While the actress has successfully campaigned for the world's destitute and dispossessed, at her own hearthside a series of disasters have unfolded.
The actress (veteran of more than 50 films, including The Great Gatsby with Robert Redford, the Agatha Christie thriller Death On The Nile, and several hits directed by her notoriously neurotic ex, Woody Allen) has been married twice.
She eloped at 19 with the already ageing Hollywood icon Frank Sinatra, and then wed the musician Andre Previn (now 79 and a stooping, frail figure who attended Lark's funeral service as her adoptive father). Both marriages ended in divorce.
Farrow has also been mother to an incredible 15 children - 11 adopted and four of her own. Two are now dead (another adopted daughter, Tam, died of heart disease in 2000 at the age of just 19.)
But of all the tumultuous events in her life, it is the climax of her unorthodox relationship with Woody Allen for which she is renowned.
Their 12-year liaison ended hideously - and very publicly - when he started an affair with Lark's sister, Soon-Yi, who was 35 years his junior and who was adopted from South Korea as a child by Farrow and Andre Previn.
Mia's ex Woody Allen started a scandalous affair with her adopted daughter Soon-Yi (right), 35 years his junior
Farrow, who had been Allen's partner and cinematic muse for more than a decade, was angered and dismayed to discover, in 1992, that he had been conducting a sexual relationship with her daughter.
The custody battle that followed had a huge impact on the Farrow family. As a friend commented this week: 'Many of Mia's children never recovered from the shame of what happened. Lark, who was then in her late teens, was distraught and many who knew the family felt that this turned her towards drugs.'
Indeed, in an unguarded moment, Lark confided to a New York newspaper that Soon-Yi was immature, had never had a boyfriend and that Woody Allen was to blame for her plight.
The relationship between Woody and Soon-Yi was said to have turned Lark towards drugs Farrow's biological son by Allen, Satchel, changed his christian name to Ronan to escape the links with his father. A child prodigy, he was accepted into law school at Yale University at 16, but has since deferred his admission to work for Unicef, alongside his mother.
A still loyal Frank Sinatra threatened to send in his associates from the Mafia to break Allen's legs, but this plan was put on hold after Mia begged her ex-husband not to do such a thing. But the uproar over the split with Allen left Mia's image as a near-perfect Earth mother and saviour to a brood of adopted children tarnished irretrievably.
And the controversy never seems to go away. Even this weekend - as Mia ended her hunger strike saying she felt 'awful' with an aching body - new stories were breaking in New York which threaten to re-open the debate about her unorthodox relationship with the maverick film director.
Lawyers for the clothing chain American Apparel have threatened to summon Mia and Soon-Yi to give evidence in a lawsuit brought by the movie director against the company. He is suing American Apparel for $10 million after they used his image in an advertising campaign, which involved him being pictured as a spoof rabbi.
The firm's lawyers are fighting dirty, saying that 'after the various sex scandals that Woody Allen has been associated with, corporate America's desire to have him endorse their product is not what he may believe it is.'
To prove their point they want to air details of his past life.
Soon-Yi, who has since had two daughters with Allen (and has not spoken to her adopted mother since the affair was discovered) may be asked to repeat what she said in court papers at the time of the disgrace.
She claimed that many of her brothers and sisters had fallen into 'theft and alcohol abuse and truancy'. Farrow herself, she added, was 'no Mother Teresa'.
The allegations didn't end there. In a tape handed to lawyers, seven-year-old Dylan (who Mia adopted while with Allen) was allegedly shown shaking and crying as she claimed that he had abused her.
This particularly poisonous allegation, always denied strenuously by Allen, finally shattered all illusions about the happy menagerie of the Farrow household.
During the custody fight that followed, a movie producer friend of Allen, Jane Reed Martin, testified that Farrow showed favouritism towards her own four biological children and treated the adopted ones like second-class citizens.
Indeed, she claimed that Lark was used by her mother as little more than 'a scullery maid'.
As for Farrow's attitude to Soon-Yi, she was quoted as saying: 'I have tried to speak to her and asked her to come home. She has not responded, so I've given up. I no longer count her as family.'
Yet as the Farrow clan gathered at Lark's funeral, it was clear that at least some of her children are still close to their mother.
In attendance were Allen's estranged son Ronan, Mia's three sons with Previn (a lawyer, accountant and architect) as well as Lark's last boyfriend, Robert Garcia, who helped care for her as she was dying.
Mia Farrow, starring alongside Jack Black in comedy film Be Kind Rewind, her latest work
Mia is also busy with movie work, last year starring in the comedy film, Be Kind Rewind, and is still bringing up her 17-year-old son Isaiah (one of six children she has adopted as a single mother since splitting with Woody Allen).
After the service, Farrow swept Sara and Christine into her car and back to her large farmhouse, with white picket fence, two hours away from New York in the countryside of Connecticut.
Lark was buried a mile from St Saviour Church, Brooklyn, New York, later in the day, with no family members present.
Soon afterwards, Mia said she was worried about the frail health of her two granddaughters, and will play a big part in bringing them up.
Perhaps this explains why she was at pains to point out during her 'fly on the wall' hunger strike: 'I am still a parent. I don't want to die.'
It was enough to bring tears to the eyes, but now she has got her wish - although the children of Darfur are still suffering.
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