Ali MacGraw
Ali MacGraw
Love Story; Goodbye, Columbus; The Getaway
Ali MacGraw first gained attention for her role in Goodbye, Columbus for which she won the Golden Globe Award for Most Promising Newcomer - Female. She reached international fame for her role in Love Story (seven Academy Award nominations), for which she won a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Motion Picture Drama and received an Academy Award nomination.
A scholarship day student at the prep school Rosemary Hall (now Choate Rosemary Hall, class of 1955), Ali - the daughter of artists - prepared for an art career of her own when she entered Wellesley College (class of 1960) on a scholarship in 1956. Nora Ephron, two years her junior there, remembers her "as a divine person who, in addition to being brilliant and beautiful, drew charming cartoons that were always on the bulletin board."
At 22, she entered the world of high fashion as assistant editor at Harper's Bazaar and went on to work as a photographer's assistant to the legendary fashion maven, Diana Vreeland. Before long, she was adorning magazine covers worldwide and appearing in TV commercials (she's the beach girl in the "Polaroid Swinger" camera ads of the mid-'60s).
She became a full-fledged star in 1969's Goodbye Columbus. Paramount executive Robert Evans fell in love with her and began guiding her career (they married in 1971).
Ali's next film role was unquestionably the best: Jenny Cavilleri, the charmingly foul-mouthed, slowly dying heroine of the 1970 smash hit Love Story, which earned her an Oscar nomination. Robert Evans continued promoting her career even after she'd left him in favor of actor Steve McQueen, whom she'd met while filming Sam Peckinpah's The Getaway (1973), and to whom she was married from 1973 to 1978.
In 1974, Ali took a four-year sabbatical from films. Her 1978 comeback picture was Convoy directed by Sam Peckinpah. After playing Alan King's long-suffering lady friend in Just Tell Me What You Want (1980), she confined her infrequent acting appearances to the small screen. She was briefly a regular as Lady Ashley Mitchell on the weekly Dynasty, and starred in the miniseries The Winds of War (1983) and China Rose (1985). She also appeared in the TV movies Gunsmoke: The Long Ride (1992), playing a character named Uncle Jane, and Natural Causes (1994).
In 1991, Ali MacGraw published "Moving Pictures", her autobiography.
Since 1994, she has lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, after "fleeing Malibu" when a house she was renting caught fire and burned down. Having become a Hatha Yoga devotee in her fifties, she made a Yoga video with the American Yoga Master Erich Schiffmann, Ali MacGraw Yoga Mind and Body, which was a bestseller upon release and was still popular more than a decade later. The video's impact was such that in June 2007 Vanity Fair magazine credited her for being one of the people responsible for the practice's popularity in the United States. Ali also narrated a documentary, The Fire of Yoga, in 2003.
In July 2006, she filmed a public service announcement for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), urging residents to take their pets with them in the event of wildfires. Two years later, she wrote the foreword to the book "Pawprints of Katrina" (author: Cathy Scott, photography: Clay Myers) about the Best Friends Animal Society and the largest pet rescue in U.S. history. An animal rights advocate throughout her life, she was given the Humane Education Award by Animal Protection of New Mexico for speaking out about animal issues.
On October 12, 2010 Ali appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Oprah arranged a "Love Story Reunion" by reuniting Ali with her co-star Ryan O'Neal. The two discussed their roles in the movie and Ryan admitted to having a terrible crush on Ali throughout the filming of the movie and asked her to go away with him even though both were married at the time.
Ali MacGraw at the Internet Movie Database