Mia Farrow recalled the moment Frank Sinatra served her divorce papers on the set of Rosemary’s Baby.
Frank took Mia’s virginity and then married her in Las Vegas in 1966, causing a storm of outrage and ridicule over the fact that he was 50 and she was 21.
The following year, their relationship went up in flames after Frank demanded that Mia leave Rosemary’s Baby in the middle of the shoot, but she refused.
He retaliated by filing for divorce and having the documents delivered to Mia at work while she was filming the classic horror film Roman Polanski.
Now Mia, 79, has explained the thought process behind Frank’s decision to end their marriage in an episode of The Drew Barrymore Show.
Mia Farrow recalled the moment Frank Sinatra served her divorce papers on the set of Rosemary’s Baby; pictured at their wedding reception in 1966
Mia’s father was John Farrow, who co-wrote the Oscar-winning script for the 1956 film Around The World In Eighty Days, starring David Niven and Shirley MacLaine.
Meanwhile, her mother was Maureen O’Sullivan, who was the Jane to Johnny Weissmuller’s Tarzan in six films in the 1930s and 1940s.
Mia became a movie star in her own right with Rosemary’s Baby, in which she played a pregnant woman who becomes increasingly convinced that she is carrying the spawn of Satan.
But making the film hit a snag when Frank “left me because I didn’t want to leave the movie when he told me to leave it,” Mia told Drew this week.
‘It still had a month. He had a disagreement with the head of the studio and said, ‘I’m getting my girl out of here,’ stuff like that,” she added.
According to Kitty Kelley’s biography of Frank, he wanted Mia to quit Rosemary’s Baby so she could star opposite him in his neo-noir film The Detective.
He tried to get Mia out of her contract by calling Paramount head Robert Evans, but was told, “While she works for us, she is Mia Farrow, not Mrs. Sinatra.”
Mia recalled that when Frank told her to leave Rosemary’s Baby and act with him in The Detective, she replied, “How can I leave it?”
Mia, who at 79 has now enjoyed stardom for more than half a century, was pictured at last year’s Time 100 Gala in New York City
The year after the wedding, their relationship went up in flames after Frank demanded that Mia leave Rosemary’s Baby in the middle of the shoot, but she refused; Mia depicted in the film
Mia became a movie star in her own right with Rosemary’s Baby, in which she played a pregnant woman who becomes increasingly convinced that she carries the spawn of Satan
She noted to Drew that she was “the daughter of a director and an actress” and as a result, she clung to the mentality that “I couldn’t leave a movie.”
Mia added that she was “in every shot” of Rosemary’s Baby and that she had only been shooting for “a month,” explaining that she “just thought it wouldn’t happen, but it did – his lawyer came on set and served me with divorce papers.”
Mia was Frank’s third wife, after his tempestuous failed marriage to Ava Gardner, for whom he had left his first wife Nancy.
Frank first met Mia on the Twentieth Century Fox lot in late 1964, while he was shooting the World War II film Von Ryan’s Express.
“He arrived and I thought, ‘What a great looking man,’ and that’s how it started for me,” Mia recalls of their first meeting.
Others were less enthusiastic about the match, including Frank’s old Rat Pack pal Dean Martin, who said: ‘I’ve got Scotch older than Mia Farrow.’
Although Frank and Mia’s romance fell apart after less than two years, they remained friends until his death in 1998 at the age of 82; pictured during their wedding
Mia’s mother Maureen O’Sullivan, herself only four years older than Frank, joked: ‘Marry Mia? If Mr. Sinatra wants to marry someone, he should marry me!’
Frank, whose children Frank Jr. and Nancy were older than Mia, eventually marrying her in 1966 at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, to great amusement.
When Ava Gardner heard news of the marriage, she commented, “Ha! I always knew that Frank would end up in bed with a boy.’
Although Frank and Mia’s romance fell apart after less than two years, they remained friends until his death in 1998 at the age of 82.
Wild theories have been circulating online in recent years that Ronan Farrow, the son Mia welcomed with her ex Woody Allen, is actually biologically Frank’s.
Frank’s daughter Tina Sinatra has laughed off the claim, which is telling Showbiz 411 her father “had a vasectomy before” Ronan would have been conceived.