#TBT: Love Letters to Mia Farrow’s Hair

With the Tony Awards just days away, we’ve been looking back at the year in theater, which ranged from the chaotically stimulating Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time to the beautifully simple Love Letters—in which Mia Farrow and Brian Dennehy read a lifetime’s worth of romantic correspondence aloud to one another amid a bare, unadorned set. More than 50 years after Farrow’s breakout role on the sixties television series Peyton Place, it was obvious why the star was cast for the no-frills performance: She commanded the stage with the same dramatic presence that first made her famous.

Of course, it’s hard to reflect on Farrow’s career without acknowledging another defining characteristic: the best supporting role of her statement-making strawberry blonde hair. Snipped, shaped, and shorn throughout her decades-long career, it’s worthy of its own billet-doux. When we first met the actress on the primetime soap Peyton Place, her cascade of thick hair echoed her character’s sweet-natured naïveté. Only a year later, in 1965, the beauty chameleon chopped her own lengths in favor of what would become her calling card pixie—using a pair of fingernail scissors. For her turn as the lead in Rosemary’s Baby, however, it was the hairstylist Vidal Sassoon who was entrusted with trimming the actress’s crop within a mere inch of her head, as presented on film in 1968.

If cutting it seemed brave, Farrow’s growing-out process was just as adventurous. The year 1972 found her pixie morphed into a brow-grazing bowl, the boyish look feminized by a doe-eyed gaze. Just two years later, the actress embodied the gregariously shallow Daisy Buchanan, with brief flaxen lengths falling just below the ear, pressed in twenties fashion and parted deep to one side. By the eighties, she had won the attention of director Woody Allen, becoming his muse for more than a decade, and adopting an Allen-esque aesthetic of shoulder-length, fuzzy, brushed-out curls framed by her bare face and easy bangs. In honor of Farrow’s role in Love Letters, here, a look back at the iconic crops that have inspired us to wax poetic.

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