ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1995, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, December 25, 1995 TAG: 9512260010
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: HOLIDAY
DATELINE: NEW YORK
SOURCE: MICHAEL WARREN ASSOCIATED PRESS
Mia Farrow isn't too hard to track down in the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel, where tuxedo-clad guests mingle under glimmering chandeliers.
While other women wobble around in designer dresses, she seems elegant in a simple wool dress and cloth purse, sharing a quiet conversation with a distinguished looking man who just happens to be Vaclav Havel.
``He was most kind and hospitable when I was in Prague not long ago for a film festival,'' Farrow explains after gracefully halting the Czech president in midsentence.
While Havel waits to take her out on the town, this famously shy actress cheerfully endures another peek into her private life for the sake of her latest movie, a black comedy called ``Reckless.''
``It's hilarious. It reads funny,'' she says after joining a reporter in a quiet corner. ``I consider it to be a brilliant script, but also a wonderful part for me - maybe the best part I've ever had. I don't know.''
Farrow seems radiant this night, amazingly youthful for a woman approaching her 50th birthday. Could this be the same actress who played the somber, bookish wife in so many Woody Allen movies?
``It's the first time in my life that I have all the things arranged the way I want them,'' she says. ``I love where I'm living and how I'm living and the people I'm living with, of course. I could never say that before, unequivocally.''
In the almost three years since her embarrassingly public breakup with Allen, Farrow has abandoned Manhattan for a big stone house in Connecticut, appeared in three movies and made progress on her memoirs. She's also adopted another child, a 6-year-old Indian boy she and the other children named Thaddeus Wilk Farrow, swelling her brood to 12.
``It's not a compulsion to go on having babies,'' Farrow says, defensive in part because Allen, at one of the more brutal low points of their custody battles, said she was crazy to adopt so many children. ``It's a matter of conscience. It has to do with knowledge and responsibility. It's central to my life, the word `responsibility.' It's appropriate if you've read any of Vaclav Havel's work.''
Farrow, who had three of her own children by conductor Andre Previn and one by Allen, says adopting and caring for the others helps her sleep at night in a world where so many children are doomed.
``It isn't just a question of `yes, it makes me feel good.' It's really that I feel that we are, as human beings, accountable.''
Farrow's philosophy seems hard-won, puzzled out over a lifetime of looking up to and then rejecting authority figures.
She disavowed the strict Catholicism of her parents, director John Farrow and actress Maureen O'Sullivan, at about the same time she was having Satan's child in ``Rosemary's Baby.'' She also turned to Frank Sinatra for answers when she was 21 and he was already middle-aged. When that marriage failed, she sought help from her sister's guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and found herself meditating along the Ganges River with John, Paul, George and Ringo.
The media treated her like she was from Mars.
``I was very young, and the people writing the articles were older. It was easy to make fun of young people looking for something spiritual in their lives,'' says Farrow, who was hounded by paparazzi.
The other major men in her life, Previn and Allen, are a decade older than Farrow. Allen has said he closely based her character in ``Hannah and Her Sisters'' on Farrow herself. She has said she didn't much like or understand the part.
Farrow also now says she never was enthralled by psychoanalysis, although Allen's enduring fascination with therapy was a theme in most of the 13 movies they did together.
After all, Allen's years on the couch didn't stop him from having an affair with her teen-age daughter, Soon-Yi Previn. And with court-ordered psychiatrists determining his access to their son, Satchel, Farrow has developed a fine-tuned contempt for the profession.
``I'm aware of just monstrous behavior on the part of therapists,'' she says. ``One of the lines that sticks in my mind from one of the therapists recently is, `It's not a therapist's job to moralize.' `Moralize' is, I thought and said, a very condescending word. You can build your life on an ethical structure.''
The fact that Farrow's life with Allen fell apart so completely may have been one of the things that attracted her to ``Reckless,'' which has attracted only small crowds since opening in limited release last month.
She plays ``Rachel,'' a naive housewife whose blissful little world is shattered by her husband (Tony Goldwyn, who played the murderous creep in ``Ghost''). He hires a hit man to kill her, then pushes her out into the snow on Christmas Eve. Rachel ends up wandering the Earth, watching other lives shatter, until she loses her mind.
Finally, she confronts her past - and becomes a therapist.
``I think it's very interesting that she chose to be a psychologist,'' she says. ``I think it attracts very damaged people, that profession.''
Farrow, on the other hand, seems healthy and centered - perhaps because she's finally discovered how to live life on her own terms.
LENGTH: Medium: 95 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: Mia Farrow says for the first time in her life she hasby CNB"all the things arranged the way I want them."