Ali MacGraw

The Style That Defined a Decade

Before stepping in front of a movie camera, Ali MacGraw spent years carrying garment bags and organizing photo shoots for Diana Vreeland. Her salary at Harper’s Bazaar was $50 a week. There, she learned that image is a tool of power, not just decoration.

Her true big-screen debut came in 1969 with Goodbye, Columbus. Audiences immediately connected with her natural style, which broke with the artificial beauty standards of the 1960s.

And then came the phenomenon.

The Love Story Phenomenon

In 1970, she starred in Love Story, directed by Arthur Hiller. The film not only saved Paramount from technical bankruptcy but also made MacGraw the most sought-after woman in the world. She earned an Oscar nomination and won the Golden Globe for a role many actresses had initially rejected as too simple.

But massive success brought suffocating contractual pressure. Her marriage to producer Robert Evans put her at the heart of the industry, but acting always took a back seat to her search for personal authenticity.

Giving It All Up for Steve McQueen

In 1972, she filmed The Getaway, directed by Sam Peckinpah. It was on that set that she met Steve McQueen, and her personal life completely overtook her career. They married in 1973, and she decided to quit acting and be a full-time wife for five years.

But her domestic confinement in Malibu ended in divorce in 1978.

She tried to make up for lost time with Convoy that same year. But the industry had changed, and her name no longer guaranteed the movie-theater lines it had drawn a decade earlier. In 1985, she joined the series Dynasty, playing Lady Ashley Mitchell for 14 episodes.

It was purely an economic decision.

A Refuge in New Mexico

In the mid-nineties, she decided to permanently step away from the noise of Los Angeles. She settled in Santa Fe, where she began devoting her time to animal rights activism and the practice of yoga. In 1994, she published her autobiography, Moving Pictures, in which she detailed her struggles with alcohol and her stay at the Betty Ford Clinic.

Because brutal honesty had always been her most distinctive trait away from the spotlight.

In 2015, she reunited with Ryan O’Neal for the play Love Letters. They toured several cities across the United States for 2016, reminiscing about the success that brought them together half a century earlier. In February 2021, she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in a virtual ceremony. She lives in an adobe home surrounded by dogs and avoids any contact with the major production studios.