The first intimate look at the cracked fairytale life of Hollywood's first family, the Farrows.

John Farrow was Hollywood royalty. An Academy Award-winning director and screenwriter, he was married to the talented and beautiful actress Maureen O'Sullivan, best known for playing Jane in Tarzan films with Johnny Weissmuller. Together they had seven children, including esteemed actress Mia Farrow, mother of journalist Ronan Farrow. From the outside, they were a fairytale Hollywood family. But all was not as it seemed.

The Farrows of Hollywood: Their Dark Side of Paradise reveals that Mia Farrow's allegations of sexual molestation by Woody Allen of their seven-year-old adopted daughter, Dylan, has roots in Farrow's childhood relationship with her father, John Farrow. John was often an abusive father to his children, his wife, and to his co-workers in Hollywood. Called the most disliked man in Hollywood, John Farrow was a tortured, tragic artist and father. He left his children a legacy of trauma and pain that the family kept hidden. It erupted only years later when Mia Farrow unknowingly revealed her pain through her words and behavior in her allegations aimed at Allen.

The book includes new research, never-before-revealed interviews with actors who worked with John Farrow, and an original theory from author, biographer, and documentarian Marilyn Ann Moss.

Author: Marilyn Ann Moss
Binding Type: Hardcover
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 04/11/2023
Pages: 328
Weight: 1.4lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.40w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9781510768833


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 03/01/2023 pg. 140
Shelf Awareness 04/14/2023

About the Author
Marilyn Ann Moss, who grew up in Los Angeles, is the author of Raoul Walsh: The True Adventures of Hollywood's Legendary Director ((2011), Giant: George Stevens, a Life on Film (2004), and is editor of the forthcoming collection, Raoul Walsh: Interviews for the University Press of Mississippi's long- running director series. Moss writes book reviews for the Times Literary Supplement and is a former film and television critic for the Hollywood Reporter and Boxoffice Magazine. She holds a PhD in American literature, film studies, and autobiography theory. She co-curated retrospectives of Raoul Walsh's films at the American Cinematheque in Hollywood, and has spoken at film retrospectives at UCLA, the Turner Classic Movies Film Festival, and at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In 2021, the Criterion Collection released her 2019, feature-length documentary, The True Adventures of Raoul Walsh, on Blu-ray.