Before Brangelina, Mia Farrow adopted family from around the world.
This week, attention has focused on life in the family compound of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, where their three biological children and the three they’ve adopted from developing countries reportedly charge around with knives, bullying staff and screaming blue murder at the top of their lungs.
Thaddeus, the 27-year-old adopted son of Mia Farrow committed suicide by shooting himself in the torso as he sat in his car in Connecticut.
Sadly, the Farrow family has had to get used to missing each other. Of the ten children Farrow has adopted since 1973 — joining her four biological offspring — three have died young and a fourth became estranged after being seduced by Farrow’s former lover, Woody Allen.
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But Thaddeus’s death reminds us of the family who started the trend for Hollywood stars to scour the poorest corners of the world for needy children to adopt. And it serves as a warning that there’s not always a happy ending to what begins as an act of charity and humanity.
Farrow, now 71, truly scoured the globe in her search for suffering, comparing herself to being ‘in a lifeboat pulling in all these people in the world in pain and distress’.
She and her former husband, conductor Andre Previn had three biological children — the oldest is now 46 — before they started on their adoption path, taking in two Vietnamese toddlers, Lark Song Previn in 1973 and Summer ‘Daisy’ Song Previn in 1974.
Four years later in 1978, they adopted a seven-year-old Korean girl, Soon-Yi, who had been abandoned by her prostitute mother.
Of these first three adopted children, only Daisy is still part of her mother’s life.
Three-month-old Lark was plucked from a Saigon orphanage and flown to Paris with a romper suit for clothing and a tin teaspoon tied to her wrist. When Farrow relocated to New York, Lark and Daisy were arrested in their teens for shoplifting hundreds of dollars worth of Christian Dior lingerie from a shop.
For Lark, that was just the beginning of her descent as she struggled with drugs and then she contracted HIV/Aids. Both of Lark’s daughters were born with the virus and grew up in near poverty in a squalid flat in the Bronx as their mother struggled to raise them alone. Lark was only 35 when she died of pneumonia in 2008, falling desperately ill as her mother was in the Congo engaged in her endless humanitarian work.
Farrow discovered that her partner, Woody Allen, was conducting a sexual relationship with her daughter Soon-Yi, the little girl adopted from Korea. Soon-Yi was around 20 at the time and she and Allen moved in together and married. She never spoke to her mother again.
Another child at the centre of the custody battle was Farrow’s fourth adopted baby, Moses Amadeus Farrow, a South Korean with cerebral palsy who she had picked up in 1980 when he was two. By 1992 he was 14 and a letter he’d written was read in court. In it he expressed his hope that Allen would become ‘so humiliated that you commit suicide’.
She went on to adopt several more children at a rate of one a year.
The first was Tam, a blind girl from Vietnam. She became the first Farrow child to pass away when she died aged 19 of heart failure in 2000.Also adopted by Farrow was Isaiah, an African-American born to a crack addict mother; another blind girl from Vietnam — Frankie-Minh; and Quincy, the daughter of another drug-addicted African-American mother.
Cynics have been saying for years that Farrow, a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador since 2000, might have been better off helping her own dysfunctional clan rather than trying to save the world.
She has never really listened.