From Alice to Zelig via Rosemary's Baby: Mia Farrow's 20 best films – ranked!

The Guardian

06-02-2025

Like many a Hollywood star, Farrow took part in a 1970s disaster movie. In this Roger Corman production she's in a love triangle with Rock Hudson, whose ski resort lies under an avalanche-prone mountain, and environmentalist Robert Forster, whose warnings are ignored. What happens next won't surprise you.
Hot off Rosemary's Baby and Midnight Cowboy, respectively, Farrow and Dustin Hoffman team up for a one-night stand, with the getting-to-know-you part coming after the sex. John Mortimer's screenplay tries to channel the permissiveness of late-1960s Hollywood, but fails miserably, not helped by zero chemistry between the two leads.
Billie Whitelaw in the 1976 original is a hard act to follow, but Farrow turns her scary dial all the way up to 11 as Mrs Baylock, the nanny from hell. She's part of a classy cast that makes this needless remake more than just tolerable.
From Interiors onwards, Woody Allen expunged all comedy from his 'serious' oatmeal-hued homages to his heroes, Ingmar Bergman and (as here) Anton Chekhov. Farrow plays a suicidal woman whose plans to sell her holiday home in Vermont are scuppered by her mother, a former actor with a dark secret. Uncle Vanya is a lot funnier.
In 1906, half a dozen rich folk gather in upstate New York for amorous shenanigans. The first of Farrow's 13 films with Woody Allen is a pastiche of Ingmar Bergman's Smiles of a Summer Night. It's sophisticated fluff, but as Ariel, free-spirited fiancee of a much older geezer, Mia has rarely looked lovelier.
After her supporting role in Crimes and Misdemeanors, Allen bumped Farrow up to leading lady again in a whimsical chamber piece about a spoilt socialite for whom a Chinese herbal remedy has drastic side effects. Minor Woody, but a reminder that most of his career was spent writing nuanced female characters, as opposed to the dimwitted bimbos of his later oeuvre.
Forget the 2022 remake, which never comes close to reproducing the high-camp larks of this ace Agatha Christie mystery. Peter Ustinov does Poirot duties when an heiress is murdered on a paddle steamer. Farrow is part of an all-star cast of suspects that also includes Bette Davis and Angela Lansbury.
Allen plays a documentary-maker with a crush on a TV producer, played by Farrow, but their story feels like a featherweight afterthought next to the other half of his darkest film, in which an opthalmologist takes out a hit on an inconvenient lover.
This adaptation of an early Peter Straub novel begins with Farrow giving an acting masterclass in panic as she botches a breakfast-table tracheotomy on her daughter. Afterwards, the traumatised mother starts thinking her London house is haunted by the child's ghost. But no, it's worse, and characters start dropping dead as a malevolent force kicks in.
Farrow received third billing, after Laurence Harvey and Tom Courtenay, for her role as a perky, Pierre Cardin-clad photographer in Anthony Mann's film of Derek Marlowe's existential spy thriller. (Harvey took over as director after Mann died of a heart attack before the end of filming.) Her relentless ingenuousness only adds to the antihero's paranoia.
Allen's film about middle-aged female regret is very much the Gena Rowlands show, photographed by Sven Nykvist in shades of beige. She is sensational as a 50-ish philosophy professor, but the tremulous vulnerability of Farrow's voice plays a pivotal role since it's the prof's eavesdropping on her therapy sessions that makes her re-evaluate her own life.
In 1970, Farrow married conductor André Previn, gave birth to twins and acted on the London stage. Somehow she also found time to play a blind woman who gropes her way around her uncle's house, only to find everyone dead. There's a killer on the loose! A straightforward thriller that delivers the goods, with Mia the epitome of a woman in peril.
This portrait of a disintegrating marriage marks the end of a golden run of collaborations between Farrow and Allen, but has acquired extra piquancy since their bust-up. In their earlier films, she was winsome; here, she is a passive-aggressive manipulator. One thing is clear: since 1992, neither has come anywhere near to recapturing the magic of their work together.
Jack Clayton's film of F Scott Fitzgerald's novel gets drunk on its own 1920s period detail, and Robert Redford is more like a film star on sabbatical than a man with a shady past. But Farrow is perfect as shallow Daisy, looking so adorable in beaded headgear and flapper frocks (loose-fitting enough to hide her pregnancy during filming) that you can understand his fixation on her.
A chameleonic mystery man crops up in old newsreel footage from the Jazz Age to Yankee Stadium in Allen's pioneering found-footage mockumentary. Farrow co-stars as his psychiatrist, Dr Eudora Fletcher, who uses hypnosis to explore his condition, falls in love with her patient, and rescues him from Nazi Germany.
Her marriage to Frank Sinatra was on the rocks when Farrow put on a long dark wig to play the unstable Cenci in Joseph Losey's mad gothic arthouse melodrama filmed in a fabulous London location: Debenham House. Elizabeth Taylor plays a sex worker who becomes her surrogate mother, while Robert Mitchum is a sleazy uncle. It flopped, but has accrued a following over the years.
One of Allen's most perfectly balanced films, this revolves around Farrow, at her most matriarchal as the den-mother bossing her family around at Thanksgiving, but unaware her own husband (Michael Caine) is lusting after her sister. Offscreen, meanwhile, Mia was busy giving birth to or adopting children, some with Woody's help, and would end up with 14 of them.
Farrow comes out blasting as a brassy gum-chewing mob widow involved with a has-been lounge singer in Allen's poignant comedy about a two-bit talent agent who cares, almost too deeply, for his oddball acts. This was the film that showed definitively there was more to Mia than the waiflike characters she had been playing, on and off, since 1964's Peyton Place.
Allen gave Farrow her most heartbreaking role in this bittersweet romantic fantasy set during the Great Depression. A mousy waitress seeks escape from her abusive marriage by going to the movies, until one day the leading man steps out of the screen and woos her in the real world. It's impossible not to start blubbing during Mia's exquisite final closeup.
When she was cast as the lead in Roman Polanski's adaptation of Ira Levin's novel, Farrow was already Hollywood royalty (her parents were Maureen O'Sullivan and John Farrow), for her role in TV's Peyton Place, and for her marriage to Sinatra, who served her with divorce papers on set. As the nice Catholic wife forced to bear the devil's baby, she draws us into every aspect of her psychological and physical ordeal, pausing only to get one of the most famous pixie crops in cinema history. One of the all-time great horror film performances.