Their sentimental relationship lasted 12 years and ended almost three decades ago, but the echoes have survived to this day.
Woody Allen and Mia Farrow formed what is often known as a Hollywood power couple in New York in the 1980s.
The New York director, screenwriter, and actor, and the Los Angeles-born actress met in a restaurant in the Big Apple at the end of 1979.
What began as a casual and uncomplicated romance intensified and ended up becoming a succession of cross accusations, and intrigues that now has a new chapter: the HBO documentary Allen v Farrow.
The documentary, a four-episode miniseries that premiered in the United States last Sunday, has as its central theme, although not the only one, the accusation made by Dylan Farrow against his father.
The couple's adopted daughter alleges that the filmmaker S- abused her on August 4, 1992, when he was 7 years old.
But Allen strongly denies the allegations, which were investigated at the time without charges being filed against him.
The filmmaker maintains that the girl was manipulated by her mother amid the ugly separation process that began after it was revealed that Allen had a loving relationship with Soon-Yi, one of Farrow's adopted daughters, and her ex-husband, the composer André Previn.
Woody Allen and Soon-Yi Previn, married since 1997, have dismissed the series as a "bad job riddled with falsehoods."
From a more general perspective, criticism of the documentary has been ambivalent.
For some, it is a biased work that is clearly on the side of Mia Farrow and does not present anything new.
Others, however, point out that it does provide new material, such as home videos of family life and police documents, and praise the on-camera testimony of an adult Dylan.
An invitation to eat
Woody Allen and Mia Farrow met in 1979 at Elaine's, a New York restaurant frequented by many celebrities that closed its doors 10 years ago.
She was then starring in a Broadway play and, after the show, accepted a date from her friend and actor Michael Caine.
Allen was in the shop eating dinner when Caine and Farrow passed her and exchanged a few words.
After that, Allen invited the actress to eat and the friendship evolved into a relationship.
"I was focused on work and children. I had moved to my mother's house after the divorce [from André Previn]. I thought that nobody would want to date a person with seven children," says Mia Farrow, who keeps good memories of first dates
The series also incorporates excerpts from an archival interview in which Allen stated, "She couldn't be sweeter and more attentive to my needs. She was cultured, charming, better informed than I was and let me be myself."
They lived in buildings located on opposite sides of Central Park and maintained that independence throughout the 12 years they were together, in which they did not marry.
From that first time, Farrow remembers that they turned the lights in their respective apartments on and off to express their love in the distance.
The Previn-Farrow clan
One of the oddities in Mia Farrow's life, which no doubt had an impact on her relationship with Woody Allen, is the number of children, biological and adopted, that she has.
In the case of adopted children, several of them have special needs.
When she began dating Allen, the actress already had extensive offspring:
3 biological children with André Previn (twins Matthew and Sascha, and Fletcher)
3 adopted children with Previn (Lark Song and Summer "Daisy" Song, from Vietnam; and Soon-Yi from South Korea)
1 child that she adopted by herself after the separation (Moses, from South Korea).
In 1985, Farrow adopted the Texas-born Dylan, and Allen, who had been indifferent to the entire process, quickly became attached to the little girl.
"I found her adorable and spent time with her, delighted to be her father to her," Allen wrote in his memoir "About Nothing," published in 2020.
Farrow wanted to spend more time out of town, and after a long search, she found a country house in nearby Bridgewater, Connecticut.
Allen would visit in the summer and spend more and more time with the children. It was in the attic of that house where, according to Dylan, the S- abuse occurred.
To the couple's surprise, in 1987 Farrow became pregnant and gave birth to her and Allen's only biological child, Satchel, who subsequently chose to go by her middle name: Ronan.
In late 1991, Allen formally adopted Moses and Dylan.
Following the tumultuous breakup in 1992, Farrow single-handedly adopted five more children: Tam, Frankie-Minh, Isaiah Justus, Gabriel (later known as Thaddeus Wilk) and Kaeli-Shea (later known as Quincy).
Lives cut short
Although the home videos that appear in the documentary give an image of an idyllic coexistence, with birthday celebrations, runs through the garden, and splashing in the lake behind the country house, the truth is that the tragedy was not foreign to the family.
Three of the 14 children have died in the last 21 years under unclear circumstances:
Tam died in 2000 at the age of 21 from alleged heart failure, although Moses claims it was from an overdose of pills.
Lark Song died in 2008 at the age of 35 from AIDS-related pneumonia, living in poverty
Thaddeus committed suicide in 2016 at the age of 28 and, again according to Moses' version, took with him the secret of what really happened with Tam.
A shared career
Parallel to all these family events, Allen and Farrow's professional careers advanced hand in hand during their time together.
The filmmaker directed the actress in 13 films and in some of them, they also shared the bill.
From the list stand out Zelig (1983), The Purple Rose of Cairo ("The purple rose of Cairo", 1985), Hannah and Her Sisters ("Hannah and her sisters", 1986), Radio Days ("Radio Days", 1987), Another Woman ("Another Woman", 1988), New York Stories ("New York Stories", 1989), Crimes and Misdemeanors ("Crimes and Misdemeanors", 1989), Alice (1990) and Husbands and Wives ( "Husbands and Wives", 1992).
The paradox is that Allen and Farrow were still filming "Husbands and Wives" when they were breaking up.
On January 13, 1992, the relationship between Allen and Farrow exploded.
They each had keys to the other's Manhattan apartment, and Farrow went to pick up a coat she had left at his house.
Next to the phone, he found a series of Polaroid photos of a young woman. Looking at them carefully, he realized that it was Soon-Yi, who was 21 years old at the time. Allen was 56...
On the other hand, the filmmaker insisted that he was neither Soon-Yi's stepfather nor adoptive father, that the young woman was of legal age, and that Mia Farrow herself had married Frank Sinatra in the 1960s when she was 21 years old. and he, 50.
From Farrow's environment, it was suggested that the relationship had begun earlier, when Soon-Yi was a minor and in high school, and it was said that, beyond the strictly legal link between them, Allen had been a father figure in the family.
In an interview given in 1992 to the American television program 60 Minutes, Allen revealed that, from that moment on, Farrow threatened him repeatedly.
"He had a terrible rage, he threatened me with death, and told me he was going to gouge out my eyes. He sent me Valentine's card with a family photo pierced by needles and scissors," he explained.
For the filmmaker, Dylan's S- abuse claim, which came seven months later, was a ploy by Farrow in revenge for his "betrayal of love" by him.
However, for Dylan, the revelation of the relationship between Allen and Soon-Yi only reinforced his own beliefs.
"It was the first time I thought, 'It's not just me,'" Dylan explains in the documentary.
