Mia Farrow

Mia Farrow arrived twice. First as Allison MacKenzie on the prime-time soap Peyton Place, which made her famous on television, and then, far more loudly, as the young wife of Frank Sinatra, a short marriage that followed her for decades. An early Golden Globe named her New Star of the Year.

Rosemary's Baby (1968) settled the question of whether she could act. Roman Polanski's film is a two-hour exercise in not being believed, and it needs a performer the camera can stay on while the world quietly rearranges itself behind her. Farrow gives it something nervous, thinning and absolutely specific, and the BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations that followed were the least of it. The 1970s kept her in leading parts, Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby and Jacqueline de Bellefort in Death on the Nile among them, without ever finding another role that fit her that exactly.

Then came the run that defines the second half of the career: roughly a film a year for Woody Allen, from A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy in 1982 to Husbands and Wives in 1992. That decade is where her comic timing lives. She is a superb deadpan foil in Zelig and Broadway Danny Rose, and in The Purple Rose of Cairo she plays a Depression-era moviegoer who falls for a character on the screen with no irony at all, which is why the film hurts in the right way.

Since then the work has been scattered and mostly character parts: Mrs. Baylock in the 2006 remake of The Omen, Granny in the Arthur sequels, Ms. Kimberley in Be Kind Rewind, Pearl Winslow in The Watcher in 2022. She is an activist as well as an actress, and that work leaves no trace on a filmography.