Twenty years after Actor Mia Farrow’s devastating split from Woody Allen – he married her adopted daughter – Mia is far removed from that media circus, VanityFair reports.
Today at age 68, she’s the mother of 14 children ranging from 19 to 43, and her focus is no longer acting but activism in Africa.
As a UNICEF ambassador with more than 20 missions behind her, Mia is particularly interested in the Darfur region of Sudan and neighboring Chad.
Mia triggered an international reaction when she she named the 2008 Beijing Olympics “the genocide Olympics.” This was prompted by mass killings in Darfur coupled with China’s support of the Sudanese government as well as its veto power in the U.N. Security Council in exchange for a claim on Sudan’s oil, according to a story by Maureen Orth in VanityFair.
Mia goes to Africa with her son Ronan Farrow, who was born in 1987 when she was with Allen. Ronan was 10 the first time he went with her to Africa, and after he graduated from college at 15, he received the title of UNICEF youth spokesperson. Currently a Rhodes scholar, he graduated from Yale Law School at age 21 and worked for the State Department from 2009 to 2012, first in Pakistan and Afghanistan for two years and then as head of the Office of Global Youth Issues, VanityFair reports.
Later this month, Mia will make her third trip to the Central African Republic, which she described to VanityFair as “the most abandoned place on earth.”
Mia’s activism began in 2000 when UNICEF asked her to go to Nigeria and help publicize a polio-eradication project. At age 9 she had been a polio victim herself, and she described in detail the isolation and fear she felt then in her 1997 memoir, “What Falls Away.”
Her second African trip with Ronan to Angola, Mia said, “was altogether different.” They met a man who told them he had had a belt like the one Ronan was wearing, but he ate it. The trip was life-changing, and she began to read voraciously about Africa, especially the massacre in Rwanda, and quickly became disgusted with Pope John Paul II: “It is a Catholic country, and yet the Pope had done nothing to end (the killings). If he had gone there—and who wouldn’t?—if he had taken over the radio airwaves, he could have said, ‘Lay down your machetes.’”
What really goaded Mia was a 2004 New York Times op-ed by Samantha Power, currently U.S. ambassador to the U.N., on the 10th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, warning that the same thing that had happened in Rwanda was unfolding in Darfur. Mia began blogging on her website, posting videos and taking photos to document the horrors she witnessed. Once, for hours, she held the hand of a man whose eyes had just been gouged out, until his brother came to take him to a makeshift clinic. “I felt very connected to him—he was in great pain,” Mia says. “I still go visit him.”
In April 2009, after the International Criminal Court indicted Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir for atrocities and he ordered 40 percent of the humanitarian-aid workers out of the country in retaliation, Mia went on a hunger strike to raise awareness and put pressure on him. She had to stop after 12 days. “My blood sugar betrayed me. The doctor said I was going to go into convulsions and then into a coma. I promised the children I wouldn’t do that. I don’t regret it. I did two or three Larry King shows, two or three Good Morning Americas. My driveway was filled with satellite trucks—we couldn’t have ever got that kind of press for the people of Darfur.”
In a 2007 op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal under their dual byline, Mia and Ronan singled out Steven Spielberg’s role as an artistic adviser of the Beijing games, comparing it to Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl’s role in the 1936 Berlin Olympics.
That was followed by a front-page story in The New York Times, as well as two meetings between Mia and Chinese officials. According to Rebecca Hamilton, author of “Fighting for Darfur,” “The three months following the publication of the Genocide Olympics op-ed saw a 400 percent increase in the number of English-language newspaper headlines linking China with Darfur, compared to the three months prior.”
Spielberg eventually resigned.
Hamilton went with Mia to Chad in 2008. They crossed rivers on tires covered with planks and traveled to places the U.N. said were too dangerous to attempt. “The special part of going with Mia is dealing with the women and kids in the camps,” said Hamilton. “Her body language—how quickly they opened up to her—you can sense when someone is interested on a human-to-human level.”
